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But as a user this is something I don't totally understand. I pay my internet company so my SO and I can access mostly Netflix and online video games. (Then things like reddit, homework, and emails) But because of the first two I pay them $50 a month to get the mid speed internet instead of $20 a month so I can do the latter 3...Seems to me that the existence of products that make me as a user need faster internet speeds is in itself a benefit to the internet provider.
Here is a little story... There are two neighbors: Verizon and Cogent. Each year in the fall Verizon and Cogent rake up the leaves to the edge of their property line, and move them to the curb to get picked up. Some leaves from Verizon's yard end up in Cogent's yard, and some leaves from Cogent's yard end up in Verizon's yard. Verizon doesn't really mind raking up the extra leaves, since some leaves from Verizon's yard are ending up in Cogent's yard. They both agree its not worth worrying about. One year, Cogent decides to plant oak trees all along the edge of the property line with Verizon. Cogent puts a little sign on one of the trees that says "Netflix Grove". These trees grow, and soon in the fall most of the leaves on the edge of Verizon's property are from the oak trees. So, Verizon decides to ask Cogent to help with raking on both sides of the property line. Cogent refuses, since in previous years Verizon had raked up the leaves without asking for help. Verizon puts up with it for a few years, and then finally decides not to deal with it any more. Verizon rakes most of the leaves, but leaves a bunch that are right on the edge of the property line. A few weeks later, Cogent starts complaining about Verizon not raking up all of the leaves.
Lol redbox lol I would NEVER pay for their service and would just as soon drop netflix too easy to get everything you want other ways. Blockbuster had a button on my roku remote like I was going to use them after years of overpaying for rentals. Verizon can suck it. Regardless of whether or not we keep Netflix, which we probably will, we will never subscribe to redbox not when we have Amazon prime, hulu, plex etc. Also, I have horrible spelling and grammar.
Alright folks, gather round. It's story time... So a person related to me (maybe by blood, maybe not - ooooooo SPOOKY) who I trust with my life (and thus I believe his/her story) used to work at the White House. At the time, it was a small Help Desk company with maybe 10-15 employees - a sub-contractor, for those who "know". Said individual was manning the phones along side the VP of the company so you know who would be the one answering any calls (read: NOT the VP). It was a late night, hence, the reduced staff, and the phone rings. A woman is having computer issues saying her screen is frozen, going on and on about how she needs to get her work done and its late so she has to be the only one around and NEEEEEEDS her computer working. Being the White House, you don't troubleshoot via the phone, you go and fix that shit. So TechBuddy (henceforth, new nickname) is dispatched to the office in question to fix the issue. TB arrives to find that it is none other than Ms. Rice, herself. Mumbly-bumbly "It's not working"/"I don't know what I did"/"Fix it or Guantanamo" abound, the mouse gets jiggled. Sure enough, no movement. Now first thing done to try to fix the issue is to actually look behind the computer to see if the mouse is even plugged in... It not. TB plugs it in, says have a nice night, and stifles giggles while walking out.
U/DasUberSquid is correct and you are wrong. The type of transaction you are thinking of is very common: exchange money for goods or services. Goods meaning physical items we can hold, touch, smell, keep forever. Services meaning something that benefits ourselves or accomplishes something we don't want to do ourselves (mowing lawn, roofing, general cleaning, etc). The new setup for SP is not what you say it is. In this case you're actually paying someone for permission yo watch the episodes. The fact that they are currently free and have been for a long, long time is just salt in the wound. Its not like buying the episodes on DVD (which is another option). Its like paying your buddy who already has the episodes in order to watch them, and then giving them back without the ability to keep them. Kinda like renting, which is also a waste of money.
well as an european where the government is completely opposite of what you got over there, our politicians uses the internet as an infrastructure. Meaning that limiting it in anyway would set the country back in terms of competitive strength to neighboring countries. I think the EU passed a bill recently that aimed to set an average speed of 20/20 across the EU zone, by 2020(?). Europe is a less monopoly friendly place too, so most places is not limited by suppliers. dont like one you will rarely have less then 3 options at hand, not counting wireless modems. The internet is used to cut budgets, it might be a bit premature, since the older generation is not quite up to beat, on that whole internet deal, but a lot of things that previously demanded human ressources is now available online, with no human interaction. So they have cut a lot of wages, out of the budget because this infrastructure is in place. banks closes physical banks and move a lot of their services online so it also has commercial use. These things demands good infrastucture, if that is not in place or if it is subpar you cant cut these costs.
Actually, the social contract is part of the government. Basically, government is a social contract between the governers and the governees where you exchange certain freedoms for the protection of the remaining rights. IE you cannot kill someone but you gain the right to life no matter what. The government can draft you to protect it's citizens, but that's an exception. There are lots of exceptions. But take into account things like the FCCs mission "The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges." The Act furthermore provides that the FCC was created "for the purpose of the national defense" and "for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications."[3]" You can tell in that last little bit WHY the NSA is so willingly given all of our information. But the first part, the part about their goal to be bringing internet to all of the people. It's going to honestly come down to the net neutrality hearing whether or not the FCC is going to come through, or whether they will break the social contract and essentially ignite internet civil war. The FCC a couple years ago was pushing net neutrality, then Obama replaced the commissioner, with a former comcast lobbyist. Now they are pushing against it, and an upcoming decision will show whether they will uphold their social contract or break it in an attempt to control the people/gain resources. The Government has (sort of) shown so far it wants to bring fast and slow lanes to the internet. A clear breach of the FCCs mission, but also promoting the ISPs economical rights, (even though we had to LITERALLY monopolize them back when they were cable companies to make ANY of this possible). This decision will make it so new internet companies (think Facebook a couple years back, before it was big) are forced to use slow lanes that restrict them from existing in the first place. The next impact it will have, is allowing the ISPs to essentially bully ever existing internet company out of their lunch money. The second interest they have shown, after essentially allowing bulllying of the nerds on campus (think Google, Apple) is to gather all information from every bodies technology. I think it is highly likely there is no backdoor, and Google and Apple are making another chess move in a game of federalism/capitalism. If there is no backdoor (of which I am fully confident we will find out before the NSA [unless it is directly given to them] since the masses of hackers seem to be miles ahead of the NSA) I say more power to them, I will even unroot my devices if required for this security it's a dark future for the internet/tech companies but there are still some of those "Don't tread on me" fighters who could end up being our only hope.
Actually, it works differently. On iOS the encryption is always enabled. iPhones have been 100% encrypted for a long time (since the 4S) Though this encryption is always on, it is useless if you don't have a code. If you don't have a code, iOS is fully encrypted, and it decrypts on the fly while you are doing things. If you add a code, the encryption key is locked away using the code. So for instance in Android 4.4, if you want to encrypt your device you need to wait an hour or so while it encrypts. In iOS 6,7,8 it doesn't need to encrypt the file system, it just needs to hide the key since it is already encrypted. iPhones have had hardware based encryption methods for ages now. iOS without a passcode is like an open safe. You can look at the safe and describe how secure the design is, and you would be right, but none of that matters if you keep it open and don't lock it. >IIRC the code you use is involved in creating the encryption key Since the device is encrypted before you even put on a code, this isn't true. Now of course, you may be asking "whats with the big commotion if iPhones have had this for ages?!" . The answer to this is that this time it is different. The reason it is different is because before, Apple had a backdoor in there which they themselves used. How it worked is still unknown to law enforcement agencies, but what did happen is that Apple allowed law enforcement agencies to send locked devices to Apple, from which Apple extracts the data. This was annoying governmental agencies because this means they had to rely on Apple. [There are some articles outlining their complaints.](
Most infosec professionals don't think that this was N.K. myself included. The original messages were an extortion attempt. There was not even a hint of political motivations. This goes completely against the DPRK's M.O. They are a country that loves to be loud about how "powerful" they are. A secret extortion attempt is pretty ridiculous when you consider their past behavior. Originally is was Western news outlets that speculated N.K.'s involvement due to The Interview. When officials from the DPRK were asked, they were coy... saying only "We'll see." This is almost certainly because they had no knowlege of the attack and were waiting from higher channels for an "official response". This is also quite out of character. The FBI's "evidence" is basically that some of the exploit kit used was kit that had formerly been used by DPRK "hackers". Essentially these are off the shelf exploit kits developed primarily by Russia and Ukrainian hackers. Their usage is exactly what you would expect from any independent group. Linguists have said that the language analysis does not check out as being typical Korean ESL language. They also say that linguistic mistakes were probably done on purpose to obfuscate the nationality of the attackers but it's likely that they were native English speaking. The "terror threats" that came later were long after the U.S. media had convinced itself that N.K. was behind the attack. This strikes me as exactly the type of dick move a hacker would make to stir things up. It's also very unlikely that N.K. would threaten "a 9-11 style attack"... if the NSA ever confirmed its authenticity there would be severe penalties... not these "sanctions" that are happening now. The FBI was WAAAY to quick to assert responsibility for the attack. No forensic analyst worth their salt would have come to such a hasty conclusion. This means that this decision was purely political. The DPRK was knocked offline by an "unknown cause". Smells to me like the NSA was flexing one of their cyberweapons.
The majority of Digital Projectors around the country get their movies delivered through the internet. A Digital Cinema Package that gets distributed to a theater for just one movie runs anywhere from [90-300GB]( Let's say it's 300 GB since more and more theaters are projecting in 4K; 100 theaters downloading a weekend's release of 3-4 films would be pretty close to that 100TB.
As an addition to Willuz's (what you talking 'bout) point - the Intelligence Community (IC) uses frequency and pattern analysis in several ways beyond fingerprinting code to determine authorship/source. Frequency analysis is used in cryptography/cryptanalysis to determine source and language in encrypted messages (Wikipedia has a good entry on frequency analysis and Simon Singh has an excellent book out called The Code Book that delves into this in greater detail). Additionally, linguistic analysis has been used to determine authorship and native language of writing (used in historicity of ancient writings, as well). One of the more famous examples of writing analysis to determine authorship was the FBI's use of Ted Kaczynski's writings, provided by his brother, and compared to his published "manifesto". His hubris, not unlike the serial killer BTK ("the floppy did me in"), was his eventual unraveling. Additionally, when certain Redditors say that country X is behind the attacks, or this is not a nation-state representative ("GOP", et al.), these are people that, more than likely, don't have access to the detailed and, I'm assuming, classified information that other "government agencies" have access to at this time. It took quite a bit of time for the anti-virus/academic/media community to unravel Operation Olympic Games (approximately 4 years by my initial calculations) and associated "malware" (i.e. Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame, etc.) , so it's doubtful that conclusions by the public at large would be considered definitive at this point in time. I believe it's doubtful that the US government or SONY will provide the media with a post mortem either, so we'll probably have to rely on leaks to the Post, Times and Journal to find out more (coming soon...). Finally, many people are providing unsubstantiated hypotheses based on junk science or just junk information (I'll be polite and say it's noble conjecture). If you have the academic credentials, are an expert in your field, or work in this field, it's great to speak up and enhance the conversation, but by adding to more "Snopes-isms" through various unsupported theories, it's not really helping those who truly want to "learn" through Reddit. Most days on Reddit, my goal is to find cute cats, laugh at multiple rainbow videos with hippies providing voice overs, and to read anonymous confessions on why someone isn't attending their grandfather's funeral, but instead chooses to play video games in their underwear during their bereavement leave. However, of late, I tend to see many posts where people provide their expert commentary based on "noble conjecture". If you don't know, just say, "I don't know". It's okay to say it. No one will bully you for it. And if they do, they are just turds and you wouldn't want them to be your friend any way (as me mum used to say so nobly, based on conjecture). [I'm getting off of my soap box now. I expect to be downvoted accordingly.]
Not ignorance of the law, ignorance of the act. Maybe it's because I work in a very risk focused area (insurance) but from my dealings with upper management they seem very focused on following both the guidelines and the spirit of the law and are very focused on knowing what is allowed and what is not. But they are not omnipresent and while they actually do seem to do their best to ensure that their company is always doing the right thing, I know that it wouldn't take much more than a few greedy lower level managers to bring legal action against the company.
The purpose of incorporating is to allow them to not face criminal charges. Sometimes I think that people forget that most upper level executives and board members only have a very high level control of the company and aren't actively trying to break every conceivable law. In this instance they probably barely even know about their telemarketing area, much less where they get number list from. Most likely the upper levels of management said that they wanted to 'increase visibility' and a lower level exec decided to earn a bonus by making themselves look good by cutting corners that they knew the upper level wouldn't notice. Then this legal issue occurs, that lower exec had moved on, and the upper management is trying to work out what happened.
We can report these to the FCC, but they are already well aware of the Cardholder Services people and they are unable to do anything about it. The option to stop answering the calls also isn't viable because they spoof the caller id to whatever they want. I once got one where it said the call was coming from ME...yeah. Here's [an article]( that covers the basics.
Seriously? Well good on you, but from one programmer to another: If any language were as fucking annoying as wiring up Flip-Flops in Minecraft (to have a tiny door switch open and closed you need a hangar of space closeby to accomodate the logic), with the stupid rules ("up but not down", "torch inverses signal", "use length of trail to switch stuff") I probably WOULDN'T have become a programmer. I would rather fix legacy PERL code than do gate logic in Minecraft again. Unless I build another palace, then perhaps, but I will hate it.
Al-Qaeda is the most dangerous entity America has to deal with right now. No, it's not because of what it does, per se. Rather, the terrific aim of its existence is what it apparently stands for, and the reaction it draws out in us. Al-Qaeda's raison d'etre is hate; not only irrational hate for its enemies, but also to bring out irrational hatred in its enemies. It is a wicked allergen, nigh-harmless on its own, that catalyzes an immune response of the most highly destructive nature. It's an organization whose primary motive is, beyond spreading destruction with mere attacks, to make its brand of hate, and the acting upon of that hate, the global status quo. And Apple is a market-leader (read: industry role-model) that wants to make it "normal" for all of your digital goods to be locked into its ecosystem. You do the math.
I hope I won't get too much flak for pointing out the obvious here: DNS is already a distributed database. There are multiple root name servers, and they delegate to other name servers via NS records. It may not have the particular decentralized properties (like a P2P system does) that some people may want, but that's a different question from whether it's distributed. Also, I think it's helpful to distinguish between distributed hosting (which DNS already has) vs. who has the authority for creating / managing the data in the database. You can create a P2P-style system, but that by itself doesn't address the real issue of putting no one organization in charge of the data. There is still the question of who says which data is and isn't authentic, and distributed hosting doesn't solve that problem. I'm not saying that distributed hosting isn't helpful (in fact, I assume it's necessary), but it's not the only piece of the puzzle.
I'm in the west coast (very close to Cupertino). The day I bought the iphone4, I clasped it as shown in the hour-long "It's not our fault" video Jobs and Apple put out at the time. I did see the bars drop from 4 to 2 and stay there for as long as I held my death grip. I released the iPhone to see the bars jump back up again. I did this a few times to be sure.
A less popular clone of reddit. The drove it's self to 'Web Suicide'.
Oh ISPs, how do we pay for your shitty networks, let me count the ways... We pay for cable, DSL, or fiber and we connect to the ISP and the ISP connects to the backbone. Netflix pays for their connection to the backbone and we pay Netflix. We also payed for telecom in the US through tax dollars that went to subsidies to build out the network. Because we actually want to use what we pay for, we connect to Netflix and request traffic, and Netflix is happy to oblige, but because Netflix is doing well, ISPs want an extra cut and feel like they can extort both the consumer and Netflix (technically extorting the consumer twice) by charging everyone yet again. Tack on a few overage fees and where being reamed! The argument would be as equally ridiculous as Netflix demanding extra money from AT&T seeing as AT&T users connect to Netflix servers and download movies.
VCs will refuse to sign an NDA because they view many proposals from many different people. The concern is that they will already have a project in the works that is arguably similar to what you are proposing, so they sign the NDA, reject your offer because they already have somebody doing it, then you sue them for stealing your idea. It can be difficult to prove that the VC didn't steal the idea, and even if it is easy to prove, often VCs determine its not worth their time. If a person is serious about their invention they'll already have the patent. If you have a patentable idea and want to use an NDA, you better have a good reason why the idea isn't already patent pending. If you can't raise the few grand it costs to get a provisional patent a lot of investors will wonder who you are that you can't even get access to a few thousand dollars. Most people's credit limit is higher than that.
The "8-bit" in this context is in regards to the "8-bits per pixel", which is a bit of a misnomer. The VGA card on a PC had a 256 colour mode, which used 8 bits per pixel, however that wasn't an 8-bit RGB value, it was an index into a 6-bit per colour channel 256 entry palette. So it was 256 colours on screen at any given time, out of a possible 262144 colours. This is over simplifying. At the time it was not unheard of for people to change the palette while the screen was drawing the image, allowing more than 256 colours. Bringing it back to the subject at hand, the SNES did not have pixels in the standard sense, it had very powerful (for its time) tile rendering hardware, I'm not sure if the tiles were allowed to make full use of the 256 active colours. The NES for example was capable of 60-odd colours, however it's tiles were limited to 4 colours which could be picked per tile. It gets more complicated still, as the SNES had a special overlay mode, where it could overlay a translucent image, bumping the simultaneous onscreen colours without trickery up to 32 thousand, although in practice it bumped it up to about 1000.
After thinking about it, this is not a tool that will enable higher res graphics in an emulator. That is not the purpose of the tool. You can see in the paper that the output of a completed scene using this tool is on par with hq4x filtering. So, a question arises of why this tool is a big deal to start with if we can already do the same with hq4x? Well, when running a scene thru hq4x, you are left with a single bitmap graphic representing the complete scene. When running an asset thru this tool, you are left with a vectorized version of the asset, which can then be further manipulated and perfected, as well as be scaled to any desired size.
If your hard drives are not spinning up then the issue is probably either the motor or the logic boards. Most likely logic board if you aren't getting a clicking. Don't try to recover anything else yourself. You need a Stage 3 data recovery. That is a clean room recovery. If the data is really that valuable this is what you need. They generally run aroun $1600ish per drive. DIY solutions might or might not work, but they will decrease the chances of recovering the drives. Basically a stage 3 recovery involves taking out the platters in a clean room and mounting them in another drive. Their are a couple of places that do this. Easiest is Geeksquad, they will handle the shipping and stuff. If you have a local place use them, but they are few and far between. I've heard good things about these guys on some podcasts I watch. Remember that there are a bunch of options to recover hard drives, but they require spinning hard drives. Also how much data are we talking? A couple of gigs, more? You said engineer, are these CAD drawings, or other schematics, or source code? I ask because I've hear mixed things about the freezer trick, but it's a VERY temporary thing even if it does work, and you run the risk of condensation in the drive. I currently work in R&D, but I worked client side support for years and I always hear "This information is priceless!" But then you slap a $1600 price tag on it and they re-evaluate that statement. If you can get it spinning again try spinrite. We had great success with that on machines when I worked for a university in IT. If you have more questions feel free to PM me.
IANAL, But Payback might be pretty simple. You wanna really fuck AT&T? Here's How: Get the message? Cool. Go file in small claims court for breech of contract. Claim Damages for Every month since they put the plan into place, Plus seek damages for the cost of the Phone (Since it is carrier locked to only work with AT&T, and when you bought it you were acting on good faith that they would not be greedy sons of bitches and breach their contract.) Your argument is pretty plain... You entered into the contract expecting what it said: AT&T will provide service for unlimited data. Now they are trying to back out of that arrangement, by impairing your service, that you paid for and have a right to expect , if you go above 2GB, an arbitrary limit that they set. This limit is justified to them because of the "Top 5%" etc etc, but your argument is that is not a legitimate justification, because they are counting the top 5% of all traffic, not just the top 5% of the unlimited. Furthermore, to drive the point home, you would bring this up: How can 2.1GB even be the mythical top 5% when they offer a 3gb and 5gb plan? unless literally nobody ever signed up for that plan, its statistically impossible for 2.1GB to be the top 5%. What i think they call the "Top 5%" is their 5% margin of mean, not the 5% of users who use the most data. Even if the radio was 90/10, (where 90% of new users sign up for 2GB plan, and only 10% sign up for 5% plan) your mean would be somewhere in the 2.3 range. I think that there is some fuzzy math going on here, and i think with someone doing a little homework, it wouldn't be hard to put a case together. I think that AT&T's bullshit wouldn't pass a judge's smell test, especially if that judge (like most people) has been fucked over by a cell company. Filing in small claims is $20 and its ruled on by a judge. Here's the cool thing though: AT&T Literally has to send a company representative (almost always legal council) to argue against you or they risk (as usually happens) summary judgement. Remember, In civil court all you need is a preponderance of evidence to win. If big blue isn't there to argue against you, then you probably will win.
It's obviously designed to force people off the unlimited plans so they can add them to the pool of suckers who get charged 5000% more per minute when they happen to exceed their limit. Greedy assholes. There's no reason why exceeding one's minutes by 45 should cost $800. Which is nearly 8 times what it would have cost had one just bought the plan with an extra 45 minutes on it. They've turned cell phone plans into a house always wins casino game where they bet that if given the chance and presented properly, most people will go over their minutes or data limit. Maybe they can even encourage it? It's the same business model as excessive late fess on DVD's and VHS at the movie store, a $35 fine for over-drawing your bank account $0.10, credit cards where if you miss a payment you get charged massive fees, or hell even forgetting to move your car for street sweeping will fine you on a regular basis.
Things simply have to change according to the new generation's supply and demand. Older generations can't run the show to their liking forever because they are not in tune with the new generation's wants and needs. Older generations are stuck with their ideals that may no longer apply, so nature runs its course; the older generations die off and finally get their f!#$ing hands out of our information superhighway. As far as I'm concerned, the internet is as omniscient as any "God" is to civilization and it's our job to keep government/corporate/wealthy interests out of the picture, or we as "the 99%" will once again be reduced to batteries which keep the wealth cogs turning, with an even deeper fetish for materialism. With free flowing information and knowledge we won't have so many non-achievers shaping our world. How many people get a free ride through life and wind up a government official or a CEO of some corporation because they had the money and power (family wealth) to sail right through the system? Bypass that whole system and we would actually see people rise to the top because they had a passion for something, and this passion is what needs to be shaping our world.
You imply that megaupload encouraged uploading of copyright material. 100% of the case points to the fact they did everything in their power to remove access to copyrighted material to keep their safe harbor status.
I'm glad people are becoming aware that we're being completely fucked over by not only corporations but by the government/globalists. The technology that we use is nothing more than a way for them to plan ahead of us so they can further control the population. We the people are merely mice in a cage being observed by the powers that be. They're able to literally read our thoughts via the web and cell phones.
Very little I would imagine. College isn't necessarily about the education you receive, but the degree you receive at the end that basically says to employers "I am smart". Even if somebody learns a skill online and becomes incredibly proficient in it they likely won't receive the same consideration as a person who went to college and majored in that field. It's much harder to prove that you have extensive knowledge to an employer through a resume that simply claims you are trained in a given field whereas a degree "proves" it instantly. Even if these online sites offer degrees they won't have the same weight as long-standing nationally recognized colleges. Online education might harm community colleges that already enroll people without the money to attend large universities but it will have a negligible effect on the majority of larger universities in the country.
This is actually much different than watching lectures. Exam grading software and graded coursework make this far different in that it's interactive with evaluated results. Things like "labs" and group work are currently impossible to make a true analog, but every class you've ever had that didn't have these elements can be taught more effectively. What's better, they can use many different educational approaches to teach you something new. Many schools will have several teachers who are all teaching the same subjects in roughly the same way. They aren't taking advantage of scale. American public education certification and how we teach pedagogy are actually far different. Teachers know HOW to teach to different learners, but they can't make exceptions for the 25% of say visual learners if 75% are audio learners. If you have 100 students and 4 teachers then you can allow one class that has graphic organizers for EVERYTHING, and a teacher that can educate like the class was deaf. However, standardized education doesn't make that possible under the current model. With cloud-sourced education they can, because with learning software they can find out exactly how you learn at 5-7 years old and keep teaching you. "Left-Brains" and "Right-Brains" tend to prefer a certain study that they succeed at because they learn it how it's taught easily and don't get discouraged. Some students learn better if some subjects are taught one way and others another. This lets that happen. Online education also allows progress and holistic education to be broken down to days or hours of a subject whose knowledge can be used in different fields. Like using Algebra, Statistics, Trigonometry, and Geometry to all solve the same problem. This way silly subjective things like "6th grade math" end up broken down into a unique and more effective experience. ALSO, this allows for entrance examinations, as well as final exams and things of that sort that can be judged against MILLIONS of others. They can see what you know, what you need to know, and how to teach it. It also has a really cool cultural effect. Imagine learning to read with LaVar Burton, astronomy and earth science from Carl Sagan and physics, chemistry and biology from Bill Nye. Maybe Mr. Wizard or Beekman teaches it in a way you can learn better. You can make friends with anyone that speaks the same language and bond over it the same way we did on Saturday mornings with our siblings. Finally, it allows you to learn at your own pace. What you learn during the school day, homework and vacations can all be accomplished up to a deadline. This way the whiz-kids don't get bored and the kids who are having trouble learning don't get discouraged. Remember how some years everything you really had to learn in a class could have been easily learned in a semester? This lets you learn that and keep rolling or gives you the time you need with fundamentals.
It's said by some free market economists (names of which I can't recall but you can look into it yourself) that it's low interest loans from government programs which drove the price of education up, for reasons I'll outline as well as I can. I won't pretend it'll properly outline everything so maybe if I miss anything someone with better knowledge can step in and fill in the blank areas while I sleep. First I'd like to add that I think it's good that people get an education, but a lot of things people get educated in aren't necessarily worth getting 40-100k in debt for, and that's a big part of the problem. I've got friends who got degrees in, for example, English literature, and then, by choice, went on to work in jobs which didn't need those degrees in any way whatsoever. They got those degrees because there was a perception people should get a degree and it was easy to get money. I also have other friends who did get work in areas which were related to English degrees and for them doing that degree makes perfect sense. Outline: The more money available to people to be spent in an area, without an increase in the available supply (of teaching in this case) in that area, will drive up prices of the existing services. It's roughly analogous to inflation. If you push up the amount of money floating around then prices will go up to match.
So the woman in the article may be guilty of being he aggressor when she went in the house AGAIN, brandishing a gun, and possibly getting a power rush and intimidating her husband. In her defence she would not have known what lies behind the wall she was shooting but still an event she could have totally avoided by not going back in. But imagine this scenario, a girl walking home alone realized she's being tailed by some guys, and when she starts to take out her licensed pistol the guys rush in on her. She doesn't want to kill any because she is a kind hearted person but if she doesn't react fast enough they will most probably overpower her and who knows what intentions they have for her (im calling rape). So she takes out her pistol and shoots at the floor, or sky if outdoors, both to shock the would be perpetrators and also as an action to make them rethink their actions, bonus effect is people within earshot will hear it and come to witness/help out in the otherwise quiet street. I'd expect the next event to unfold to be a few words being exchanged between said woman and attackers, idieally diffusing the situation and they go their separate ways. Next day newsflash,
The article was talking about the top provider being a consistent average of under 3Mb/s. Whether people have a 150Mb/s wireless or a 1000Mb/s wired at their house is not the limiting factor on which provider is giving them under 3Mb/s. Heck they could even have an archaic 10/100 router and still be much faster than the 3Mb/s that none of the providers reached.
Also, Its pretty bullshit to put something like google fiber as a "major ISP" for this ranking. Here's the speedtest for my office. and I'd wager that there are some universities with more users than Google Fiber. Why don't we get some info for those.
The majority of Kansas City is in Missouri, and google fibre has not been expanded in Kansas. Also, on the topic of population density, >Average US population density: 34,01 people per km^2 >Average Missouri population density: 33,69 people per km^2 both numbers from the page you linked. Also looking at [this]( and [this]( it is a fairly safe assumtion to say that Kansas City, Missouri is a generically average city that is able to represent much of America. Google isn't doing this to save the world from shitty internet. While their unofficial motto may be «Don't be evil», they are still a business. Google fibre is a test run to see if ISP is a market they can branch in to, and Kansas City, Missouri happens to be a good test market due to being very business friendly regarding laws and that most of the internet lines are above ground. People get sick of shitty anything no matter where they live. There being more people doesn't necessarily make for a better test run. Why else do you think companies do test runs on small markets instead of New York or San Francisco most times? Because New York and San Francisco aren't accurate presentation of the population, even if it would mean more money made in the short term.
Ouchy! The cheapest Cisco router which will actually handle 10Gb/s on WAN will set you back about $68,000 (ASR1002-X with proper licensing). Thing is, there are few websites which can deliver 10Gb/s continuously. Taking overhead into account, 10Gb/s is about a full 4.7GB DVD every 8 seconds. You'd quickly run into the other problem - how do you manage the data when you can fill up a 1TB drive in around 3 hours? You'd need some pretty serious equipment after the router to handle that much data and we're a few years from having machines that can actually digest 10Gb/s at Best Buy and the like. I use Business Class at home and even with 3 Netflix accounts running at the same time, 20Mb/s has been more than enough. Uploads are capped of course to about 5Mb/s. For service providers, 10G outbound is ideal to allow the greatest amount of over-provisioning. Usually this will connect into rooms full of servers which are handling all manner of requests. Most people use 10G to connect their switches when they don't opt for staking of the backplane.
Comcast Business Class Internet and Comcast Business Class Ethernet are two entirely different things. You have their small business service which is simply a glorified residential connection with a heftier price and business oriented features such as static IPs and guaranteed tech support. Comcast Ethernet is an enterprise solution for large organizations that require things like 99.99% uptime and dedicated bandwidth that cannot be consumed by other customers.
I'm a bit of a "power user" but whatever. Consider: I go to a top-ten engineering University and have access to some of the fastest internet around as a result. I'd be surprised if it wasn't the fastest in the state, let alone the Midwest. On a given day, I might: Watch some TV, via Netflix, Hulu, ESPN3, or various other streaming services (I had several World Cup streams going simultaneously, for example) Remote control several computers that are NOT NECESSARILY on a local network (often over SSH, sometimes over VNC which is far more taxing) Listen to music over Google Play and/or stream some YouTube Update my various apps and games via app stores and Steam (and download entire new games, often several gigabytes at a time) And quite honestly, that is a lot , and I can see a speed hit . Even for some of the best internet in the state. While the buildings are mostly empty (Christmas/Summer vacations). Now imagine: it's a year, two years down the road. Local power (read: my five year old, outdated as hell laptop) has been replaced by The Cloud and more powerful streaming services. Rather than buying a whole new computer, I can rent a cloud-based "gaming" machine and control that instead with the newest games and power. Need for faster internet just goes up more and more every day for people like me. Exponentiate it with the fact that we no longer have just one computer in a household anymore. Every member of the family has at least a laptop, and several have smartphones and tablets. More data usage, no matter how you factor it in. Maybe you're like me, and use them as extra screens/processors, so I can stream one remote computer over VNC to one tablet, listen to Google Play or watch TV on another tablet or smartphone, while doing my main work on my laptop...over a stream...of VNC. Or play a game, or update one, with Steam, or that cloud-based gaming platform (which is a thing, it's real, and it's trying to take off right now). Oh, and if you don't live with your family? Then it's even worse! Try sharing ALL THAT with several like-minded roommates. Oh, and I have to drive to my university library to do all this. I can't just do it from home quite yet. I want to. But it's just not a option.
Hey, am a Kenyan IT student and I assure you that this article is utter bullshit. Why? It wasn't reported in any of the media companies in Kenya and it would have been big news. I would have noticed it also as am big on these topics as I aspire to be a web and mobile app maker. It is way to vague with no verifiable sources and vague statistics. As other posters have mentioned, it uses too much advertising and OP's posting history is mostly spam.
AT&T Has a big bad rep due to the international eavesdropping closets they let the government set up. However, they haven't so readily and willingly just handed over user data and info (or enforced MAFIAA efforts) as much as Verizon has.
Do you use ABP on your browser at home? Which app store did you get that from? If I want ABP, I Google "Adblock Plus" and magically I'm taken to their site where I click a button, download, and install their plugin. It's a trivial matter for ABP to point you to their site to download and install an APK for your phone, almost as trivial as it is to get the browser extension from their site. In fact? it would seem that they're already capable of getting it to your device sans app store. Google makes it very easy to install Adblock wherever I want to use it simply by returning the ABP site when I search for it. If you know what ABP is, you can have it in an instant by using the tools provided by the very company that everyone is accusing of denying you that right.
A straw man is when someone replaces what is actually being argued with an apparently similar argument and attacks that instead. In this case nhjknjksdf is attacking the argument that Google has to earn the right to show us ads through goodwill but the actual argument being made is that people don't want to see ads at all and/or don't want ads to have unfettered permission to save cookies and run scripts on their devices.
You know, congress gets lots of shit for not getting things done, which is understandable. What most people don't get however, is this is exactly the type of system the founders wanted, a system that would deliberate and pass legislation slowly to avoid the "tyranny of the majority". Granted the filibuster and special interests play a bigger part now, but an inefficient system is what they intended. I still hate politicians.
Well, yea, but that's what they say they're about and the reputation they have crafted. Be careful pointing out the logical fallacies of the left around here, though... Some people may get upset that the party that's supposed to be on the side of individuals is also in favor of big government and that the two are mutually exclusive. And then someone will point out that Bush grew the federal government more than any other president and then you have a big fight about which president did what and partisan politics just gets slopped onto everything.
Tell every US Citizen you know to do the above. You can also contact senators as a non-Citizen and ask them to not do things that would negatively affect you, but depending on the Senator they may not care, may only care a little, or may consider your voice equal to US Citizens.
Please try reading the two paragraph article before commenting.
I'm struggling to see the practical difference between a 'real' security hole (which in your opinion it's okay to disseminate) and a bot-prevention system (which it's not okay to disseminate). Firstly, actual security holes put anything at risk, from consumer information to credit card information. Huge quality of life affects for everybody when this stuff gets leaked. Secondly, breaking recaptcha WAS ALWAYS a competition. Being able to successfully create bot accounts is incredibly lucrative so I doubt these guys were the first to have a workable solution to the issue (just by far an away the most accurate). So forcing improvement in the area was necessary, but Google decided to break it instead of improving it for the sake of laziness/expediency. And lastly, Google made the Internet a shittier place for the handicapped, not these guys. They aren't ass holes for solving a 'complex' problem, they just proved how weak the current implementation was.
The NSA bas been contributing selinux code for years, not just to Android but to the Linux kernel. This is not news, nor is it anything to be concerned about since the code can be and IS audited regularly by people way more interested, informed and concerned by any of us.
The problem is that the unrelated data is then sitting on a server in the police station, from whence it will be backed up at some point. Then, in the future, they pass a law that says that government owned data must be shared between law enforcement. Suddenly, that data accidentally becomes legal to be used by everyone, without a warrant. Or in some other way they get legal access to it.
That's like saying you shouldn't upgrade your car because you could break the engine. Yes, if you don't know what the fuck you're doing, you can break something." Well... this IS true. (people who don't know what they are doing, shouldn't be rooting their devices) The problem I notice with a lot of consumers these days: They want all the flexibility, freedom and customizability of hacking/rooting. ...but they still want the ease of use, reliability and consistency of a stock OS. Problem is you can't have both of those things. They are divergent-goals. It's like saying:... "I want the best security/anti-virus for my computer, but I don't want to ever have to maintain/think/update it"...
Doubt it, they used a now rate limited api call with a huge list of numbers to 'find friends' in the app, which came back with usernames connected to each number.
Bull shit , and here's why - my kids love to stream youtube, sometimes Netflix. Sometimes my spouse does too. And me. Now, if Netflix is using storage on my PC to store movies for someone else and uploading them while I'm downloading all their crap, then the games we're all also playing will slow down.
ELI5, what difference would this make for the average user?
Netflix's bandwidth use is huge, and broadband connections are usually asymmetrical - they are maybe 10X slower uploading than downloading. This will punish slow connections, and where people have data caps it may incur a lot of overage charges which non-tech people won't understand. This was tried before, in 2005 or so, with a BBC video service called iPlayer, you can google to see how people felt about that. So it'd be unpopular with many customers. But... this would have big implications for network neutrality. Because of Netflix's heavy bandwidth use, it gets throttled by ISPs who want a bribe from Netflix to deliver video to their users. Their customers are already paying for their traffic and connections to the internet, but the ISPs would like to get paid twice, and are holding their customers hostage. They also don't want competition to their own video offerings in many cases, so deliberately degrading Netflix traffic might make them money. By using P2P, Netflix would move the source of much of this traffic to inside the ISPs networks, reducing the ability of ISPs to strong-arm them with rent-seeking and wholly unjustified interconnect fees.
I have always wondered about the IQ level of people who worry about using AA batteries because going through them costs money. I was 5 years old when I figured out that batteries are best when rechargeable. All it took was watching $8 worth of batteries die after only 10 minutes of driving a RC car to move to rechargeables. I have used battery operated items for many many years now without dumping through batteries.
Microsoft is making a lot of unpopular decisions as of late. I can understand that these where written on the wall long ago but this is starting to get worrisome for someone who depends on the Windows platform for day to day computing. I've seriously thought about ditching windows for Linux considering all the failed projects that they have come up with in the past few years. If they don't innovate themselves out of a this wet paper bag, come Win9, I'm probably just going to deal with running all my windows optimized apps/applications from a VM until I find viable alternatives in the GNU-sphere. Honestly, just about every computer with more than one core is 1-2 upgrades away from being able to run applications from windows on-demand and seamlessly in Linux and Microsoft isn't doing PC sales any favors by pissing off its user base. If it doesn’t recover from all this nonsense in the near future the company CEO is going to watch his business slip away and the next guy is going to inherit the shell of their enterprise support division and maybe whats left of the console market.
I've had this same problem that you, not the guy above you has. I have seen my connection, when I lived in an apartment complex, drop down to .5Mb/s down and .2Mb/s up, instead of the 30/5 I was paying for. Then they gave me the whole "up to" schpiel, and I told them that my internet was unusable, then they directed me to tech support which just "rebooted" my router for me. So then I realized that they probably gave me a shit router. Put that fucker into bridge mode, added my own router, and boom goes the dynamite I had my connection again.
So, does that mean I'll be able to declare myself a "CDN" and stop paying for colo? Good question. Consider a few things: You can peer with whoever is convenient nearby, but if you want your content available everywhere, you'll have to pay for some transit too since there are 10s of thousands of separate networks out there (Autonomous Systems). That interconnection port costs some money. So have some minimum bandwidth to exchange. Less if you and your peer are at a public Internet exchange, but there's still some cost there. How much of the burden of moving the traffic is on your side of the peering versus the other? Take a look especially at that last point. A couple small local ISPs (or ISP and content provider) here in Seattle might both have a router they can use to peer cheaply at the Westin Building. Or they might already be connected to the SIX . But if you're a content provider in just that location, the burden could by very one-sided. Your peer might be carrying traffic from around the world to your doorstep, and the reverse - taking traffic from your doorstep and delivering it around the world. Back to the current case. Netflix offers to take as much of the burden as Verizon will allow - delivering traffic on the doorsteps local to the end users.
Former FiOS customer here; You will see throttling. Maybe not in the beginning, but later on you'll notice Netflix, YouTube, DropBox, and moat popular services have magically slowed down. Dramatically, nearly to a point of unreliability. Switched to Optimum Online, much faster speeds for a much lower price, no throttling, everything has been nice. I can actually watch a 1440p video flawlessly. 1440p on FiOS? That was a dream. Yet, through a VPN, 1440p worked perfectly fine.
Your ISP is the last mile connection between you and the internet. Everything that you want to see, first travels to your ISP and then to you to be assembled into meaningful information. What he's showing is that when his ISP tries to get data from Netflix's servers his datarate is only around 400kilobits per second, which is much less than the 75 megabit pipe connected to his house. Now his ISP isn't going to serve Netflix at 75megabit unless they can get it at that, because in this case the ISP is a bottleneck on the connection. This is data from his control run. What he does next is to work around this bottleneck by connecting to a VPN service which presumably has a better connection to the Verizon network. The VPN network pulls data from Netflix, serves it to Verizon, who then serves it to you to assemble as a streamed video. This extra step is faster, only because Verizon has a slower connection to Netflix's data-centers than to the VPN service, who themselves can pull Netflix data fast enough to serve it to Verizon at preferable speeds.
Oh Gott, story time: Seit 2 Wochen kein DSL mehr von o2. Telekom Techniker erscheint zum vereinbarten Termin einfach nicht. O2: "können wir nichts machen, telekom schuld", telekom: "können wir nichts machen, o2 schuld". Nächster Termin in frühestens 3 Wochen, man kann nur hoffen, dass der Techniker dann auch kommt. Fickfinger gehoben, heute bei Kabel Deutschland unterschrieben. Kündigungsfrist bei o2 ist vier Wochen, denke nicht, dass bis da hin das Internet laufen würde. Heilfroh in weiser Voraussicht keinen 24monate Vertrag bei o2 unterschrieben zu haben.
Encryption doesn't solve all problems with secure communications. Take for example UEFI . It's meant to further lock down the computer hardware and give possibility to run hidden programs for surveillance. Background The BIOS is a program that is stored on a chip (flash memory) on the computer motherboard. It executes right after you start your computer, it initializes the hardware and starts the boot process (usually a program on HDD) from where the operating system takes control. Now, the BIOS has very aged architecture that limits it's functionality with new devices. Therefore UEFI was developed as an alternative. Intel first developed EFI, and then later it became UEFI. It improves the support for modern computer hardware, but it also brings a lot stuff that people may not want. Secure boot The most publicized case is about the secure boot , so it's invisible to the OS and has complete control over the computer. The protection works by a requirement for the boot program to be signed by a private key that is stored in the UEFI memory (flash memory). Only if the program can be verified it's allowed to execute and start the OS. The problem came when Microsoft cut a deal with OEM partners to include their private key in computers certified to use Windows 8 with Secure Boot enabled, which might cause problems when installing an alternative operating system, such as GNU/Linux. Therefore Microsoft could lock-out users of computers from installing another OS using cryptography and [secure computing hardware]( Here's more on the story : [Is Microsoft Blocking Linux Booting on ARM Hardware?]( Remote management system The second, less publicized privacy issue with UEFI is, that in includes remote management system, that is operating on a separate network channel, outside of the OS, has a full access to the hardware (incl. keyboard, memory, network adapter). It's very similar to Intel's Active Management Technology . Last year during the 30C3, [researches presented DAGGER]( malware that could overwrite the AMT program on the motherboard, collect the keylogs and send them to a remote host while the OS has no idea about such activity. They also point out, that even though they have disabled the AMT in the BIOS, they found out it was still running. Because Intel AMT is also running separately on it's own chip you will have to literally unsolder this chip from the board to make sure it's not doing something behind your back. UEFI replacement Customers don't have an option to replace the UEFI completely. While you can in some cases replace the original proprietary UEFI with open-source alternative ([Coreboot]( you cannot do so completely, because you will still have to use proprietary driver from the hardware manufacturer. If you develop your own alternative driver, you might get sued for violating patents/copyright on the technologies the hardware utilizes. Summary In summary, security by means of encryption can be used both ways and big corporations with governments might use it to lock down the hardware and make it impossible to securely encrypt the information before they have the access to it.
Well there's actually a petition to legalize medical, recreational, and industrial marijuana that's collecting signatures for a state referendum. And 56% of the state voting population is for legalization at last polling. But our state constitution has really strict restrictions that require an absurd amount of votes. So unless we get outside donations, like colorado and Washington both received in droves, it probably isn't going to happen. It's tough to get that many signatures without paying the collectors, because it takes so much time and resources. In addition, legalization has been proposed in the state legislature every year for a while now, but the committee of health it goes to first is really conservative so it gets shot down without a vote.
Native Detroiter here, can lend some perspective. As the world works right now, it makes less sense to have dealerships. But as for the reasons why dealerships were a good idea in the first place: Once upon a time, the only way to buy a car was to go to an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer - Ford, Pontiac, Packard, Oldsmobile, etc.) licensed dealership. That dealership would only be allowed to deal in one brand of car. The problem was, that was the ONLY place to buy that brand of car. Didn't have a Ford dealership within 200 miles of you? Well fuck you then, you're stuck with a brand you don't like or maybe none at all. Remember that building that infrastructure was a lot more expensive 80-90 years ago. So the dealers operated like the Apple stores do today - you go in and you only see those products. What the laws in place did were to effectively say "You can't only sell your product in only your own dealerships. You must sell to a dealer who is allowed to carry as many brands as they like." It would be like forcing Apple to sell their products in Best Buy and other multi-brand retailers. Back then, it was a good thing because it really bumped up competition. So long as your local dealer carried the brands you were interested in, you could look at and try out as many vehicles as you liked. Also remember that there was no internet, and no reliable way to see what the products were like without investigating them firsthand. The dealer-OEM relationship also helped stabilize the economy somewhat. Since the dealerships like to keep a large stock at hand, their purchases tended to smooth out somewhat small fluctuations in buyer preference and purchasing ability - if the market took a downturn for three months, the dealers would likely still be buying up stock for the year. So long as the internet and technology to support direct purchasing didn't exist at the scale it does today, it was relatively win-win-win. For the most part. Of course, over the last few decades there has been a steady shift in the world to the OEMs being technologically capable of selling direct in the way a consumer would respond to. However, this has been prevented for a few reasons: The dealership lobby was way too strong to deny. And for good reason: The dealership network represented far too much of the national economy to really risk upsetting that apple cart. To give a sense of scale as to how much dealerships impact the economy, in 2012 a study ["estimated the overall impact of these costs on the 2012 U.S. economy at $10.5 billion in lost economic output and more than 75,000 fewer jobs."]( That was just due to regulation changes in 2012 . From 2008 until 2011, the number of new-car dealerships dropped over 3,000: [from 20,770 in 2008 down to 17,700 in 2011]( Until now, fucking with the dealerships would mean fucking with the national dime. Accountability and service: When you buy a new car from the dealership, you're also entering into a long-term relationship with them for maintenance support and recall assistance. Can you imagine the hassle if you had to ship your vehicle to a major hub (if you're lucky) or all the way back to Detroit for warranty coverage? All that said, I ultimately strongly support direct-purchasing of vehicles and it will happen eventually. However, I also understand what that could mean to the economy and the people who work at and support the dealerships. It should be a slow process, much slower than might otherwise seem necessary in this day and age, to give the dealerships and the market at large time to adapt.
We asked for this back when we complained about censorship. Unfortunately, it goes both ways. What's sad is how many upvotes it's getting.
What you are really seeing is a push from the unions (money and lobbying). The big 3 see the writing on the wall (Ford less than the Chrystler and GM). No one wants their cars; they are overpriced, unreliable (dangerous in GM's case). But it's not just the companies that see the future, the automotive unions see it too. Letting a mid priced electric car that competes with the big 3 mid priced cars would destroy whats left of the companies. This in turn would reduce the size of the unions because so many workers would be let go. Look at Michigan and understand, cars is all they really have left. They have essentially tanked in every other industry other than farming. Automotive is all they have left, and if Tesla moves in they could lose that as well.
In some cases we probably are arguing semantics. If your point is that "money goes into the system and dramatically affects political outcomes to the disproportionate advantage of the rich and well organized, and that fact is disturbing and should be addressed," then you and I are in complete agreement. I continue this argument, not to convince you otherwise, but to explain how legislators and lobbyists can still sleep at night without being sociopathic monsters. To the extent that you are still interested, there is an explanation for why lobbyist spending skyrockets when important legislation is on the table, and it doesn't involve legislators selling votes. Bear with me, there is a lot more explanation than you are probably interested in, but I think it helps shore up my point. Also, at some point, you may start wondering what my source is for all of this. It is personal experience. I worked for a few legislators (federal and state) before becoming disenchanted with politics and moving to the private sector (not doing anything related to politics). First, I did not mean to suggest that no money changes hands between elections. If I gave that impression, that was an error. I simply meant that, the preferred method of donating is in exchange for favorable election results rather than a favorable vote. The point being that it is economically more efficient for them to help an ideologically similar candidate get elected, than it is to buy votes. However, as you correctly point out, quite a lot of money still changes hands during the off season, and my defense of legislators "integrity" is incomplete without addressing that issue. As I'm sure that you are aware, because of the fact that cash is necessary for successful campaigns, and large sums are thought to win elections (there is some good evidence that additional dollars spent in campaigns produce diminishing returns, but this is not that discussion), legislators spend a great deal of their time raising money. Yet, how they spend that time is important. Most federal legislators spend most of their professional hours (and many of what normal people would call "personal hours") doing what is called "call time." State legislators spend a bit less time doing call time, because many of them have real jobs. During call time, the legislator and a team of assistants dials and dials and dials and dials for hours on end, trying to get anyone on the phone who might donate. A typical legislator, in a typical hour of call time, can generate around $300-$500, minus the cost of the staff employed to assist. Most people think that they're always calling the super-donors, but that's not usually true. It is the staff's job to estimate how much each potential donor might be willing to donate. The legislator then tries to make the most valuable calls during the time available. For a new, relatively unknown member, the cutoff might be $50. If the staff doesn't think you will donate at least $50, then the member won't call you personally. As the member becomes more prominent, gains seats on important committees, or the district becomes more competitive, the number of donors increases, and that cutoff number goes up. So, a middling member might raise that cutoff to $200. At the highest levels, members like John Boehner only call people who are going to "max out," because there are enough of those people on his list that he would be leaving money on the table if he called anyone else. (To "max out" means to donate the statutory maximum donation for an individual contributor, last I checked it was around $2700 each for primary and general election, meaning an early donor could max out at $5400.) All of this is just to establish how they value their time. For an example below, I will use $500/hour of call time as a ballpark average. Please note that I am not prepared to defend that number, and I don't believe that the particular number is relevant to the point I am about to make. So, when a bill comes up, all the lobbyists want to make sure that all the members have the particular information that the lobbyists want them to have. (Everyone knows this information is biased. More on that below.) But, in order to attend that meeting, the member has to give up an hour of call time. He's going to refuse unless the lobbyist can make up for the lost revenue. So, there's a $500 fee to get in the door. When really important bills come up, there's more competition for each hour, and the value of that time gets bid up. If there is enough competition, as there often is for omnibus bills, defense bills, or anything else where thousands of special interests are clamoring for a piece of the pie, the value of an hour might be bundled contributions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's why lobbyist spending increases so much when important legislation is on the table. So, members are openly selling their time and attention, and it's worth pointing out here that I don't think that's a good thing. However, it is not quite the same as selling votes. Most members view it as a lot like being paid to watch a commercial. The (funny?) thing is, to continue the commercial analogy, there's not that much pressure to buy. When time gets expensive, the special interests who know the member opposes them will drop out of the bidding pretty early. (Imagine Exxon bidding for Dennis Kusinich's time. Why bother? They would never convince him to flip on any of the votes they care about.) Instead, the special interests that the member supports, or is relatively undecided about, are the ones that end up making those big donations. So, when it comes down to it, it's a really soft sell. The real problem is that legislators, like the rest of us, think that we are too smart to be affected by advertising and sales pitches. They think that they can go sit in a restaurant with a lobbyist, listen to the pitch, filter out all the bullshit, collect the check, and then do whatever they were going to do anyway. I'm certain that every one of them thinks that. The lobbyists, for their part have an incentive to keep their information at least within the realm of believably. If a lobbyist provides a member with a set of totally insane "facts" that cause the member to be ridiculed when he quotes them, that lobbyist is going to suffer some loss of access. I don't expect you to find any of this comforting. I know I didn't. But as bad as legislators often are, I think it's worth remembering that they are rarely so compromised that they deserve to be called corrupt. Most of them are just run-of-the-mill narcissists and assholes.
First, the more people eat at a restaurant, the more people who will actually enjoy the food may spend money in the future. Sure, there are people who will never give you a dime, but chances are they were never going to be a customer in the first place. Second, there are people who have no idea if they'll want to buy your food unless they've checked it out first. Just because I've eaten one thing at a restaurant, it doesn't mean I'll enjoy everything on their menu. If I do, then I'll buy it. I rarely eat a dish more than once. If I like a meal so much that I'd eat it again, then I'll buy it. Your first two points don't make sense. Just because the product comes in a different format, it doesn't make it any less of a product. You can attempt to justify it if it makes you feel better though. I choose to disagree with you. Simply because the means exists for a product to be copied infinitely without loss of the original for little to no cost doesn't mean I should. Your third point, however, does make sense. The question however is what is appropriate. To some consumers, a dollar is too much. Free is always the right price. Companies would argue $15 dollar DLC is perfectly fine. However, the decision isn't up to the TPB to make, it's up to the company. TPB makes available the "free" pricing option that ruins a company's ability to correctly judge the market. Look at Anime, a lot of companies are embracing the free digital stream to promote their product. It shows some business embrace the model. The company should receive ad revenue for the free release, not TPB.
I've read most of your posts, and your logic is irrefutable. You are right in what you say, and no, it is not fair to you and the others working in the Music Industry. What I will say though is this: I don't believe it can be stopped. This whole situation has been caused by the new age of digital information. The ability to transfer and move information has wrecked the ability of the industry to control their media, and there is no way to stop this. You add greater security, the hackers find a better way to get around it. In my opinion, the future of the entertainment industry will end up having to change. Sooner or later it will realise that this is a battle that cannot be won, and the smart ones will adapt quicker. I foresee fundamental changes in the way that things are done. Public and Live performance will become the staple for all types of artist. New technologies will continually be developed that cannot be downloaded - 3D technology is already one example. (And how long will that last before it can be?) Really, the entertainment industry needs to start stepping one step ahead of the game, but they're not. They're trying to wrap their arms around a pile of leaves. The more they squeeze, the more falls out. If they're smart, they'll realise - 'You can't stop the signal'.
The thing is, nobody cares if the companies are being reimbursed or not. I don't pirate anything other than TV shows (which are legal because of time-shifting) but I don't buy music or movies either. I borrow movies and music from my local library, I will never give the studios or **AA's of this world a penny because they don't create anything. Music artists make most of their money from touring so nobody is worried about them quitting or going broke. Movies are almost pure shit, so nobody wants to throw away 10 dollars at the theater for something that probably sucks. They also don't want to spend the 20 dollars to buy a DVD unless they know they will like it. Books are the one thing I do spend money on, and even then I never pay more than 5-9 dollars, but I never blindly buy a book either. I usually read a good chunk of it in the store before buying, and I don't mind because the physical book itself has a value close to the asking price.
summary: Google thinks it's BS that their gay employees with domestic partners have to pay more in taxes than their straight married employees, so they're covering the difference. This way, all their employees get the same take-home pay, regardless of sexual orientation. My only complaint is that it should also include straight non-married domestic partnerships. But this is a reasonable compromise, since the gay couples don't have marriage as an option (for federal tax purposes, anyway)
Hi I'm the government, and I intentionally moved blogdelnarco.com out of the cheaper tiers so less people see it, and some day, screaming "who will think of the children!11" I'll move it to the adult/xxx pack that most people don't get and most ISPs don't offer out of political correctness to make it even harder for you to access the content.
Who cares where the first link is going to go? If you start in LA, you can't link directly to Sacramento without going through that nowhere to nowhere section at some point. May as well have the cheaper parts finished before you start building through the larger cities. Where did they drive the first spike in the transcontinental railroad? It wasn't in New York City.
I'm not being sarcastic here I'm trying to be realistic. I understand the theory behind infrastructure investment: better interstate transportation can encourage more commerce (and hence more jobs) but will it necessarily do this? It certainly did in the past because, many decades ago, interstate connections were terrible and the country's commercial/business/manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly. But is that the situation now ? Throughout this entire crisis you have heard businesses complain about many thing that are hindering their operations or expansion (e.g. access to credit) but I have not read one article where a single company said: "my business would improve significantly if there was only better interstate transport". This venture can only help if it improves significantly the transport of labor/goods/resources to companies that are finding it hard to get labor or finding hard to move goods/resources or if it allows companies to be born that could not have been born without it. Unfortunately I know of no company that is having trouble getting labor to their work sites and no company that complains of having trouble moving goods/resources. Not to belabor the point but when the rich CEOs started moving thousands of jobs overseas they continuously said: "don't worry - this will open up opportunities for new, higher quality jobs instead" - however they did not explain what these jobs were or the mechanism by which these jobs would appear - they (and everyone else) just made the assumption that this would happen. Now we know that while this assumption sounded nice it did not actually happen (at least no real permanent jobs appeared - only jobs connected with Internet/Housing/Financial bubbles appeared and then disappeared and there was an increase in minimum wage service jobs). I'm afraid that the assumption that making interstate transport somewhat easier automatically results in increased commerce, but with no explanation as to the mechanism by which this will occur, will also be incorrect. Unless you can point me towards articles that show that there are a significant number of companies that are actually saying: "we really need better interstate transport to improve our business" - rather than endless articles by people who are basically saying: "in the past improving infrastructure directly improved commerce, therefore in this (very different) present the same will happen". Does anyone know of any? BTW as was pointed out, there is absolutely no money to gain while it is being built - since it is funded by Federal funds it can only contribute to the national debt. Only after completion, when private enterprise starts to use it, can it theoretically start to pay off. But will it?
Nobody is saying we need to get rid of cars, or ignore investments into our freeways. Give the consumers a choice, by giving them rail. Also, a quick glance at [this page]( suggests that rail IS more efficient than automobiles or planes. At least when you take advantage of the train's capacity.
Hehe, I just went through my submission history and it got a respectable 70-80 points in /r/sports. There were other good articles that didn't do well.
You sir, are ridiculous. Where in that did I say it was impossible to program on a mac? I'm simply saying that whatever you bring to class make sure it runs the program language we're learning before you step into the room. Quite frankly I couldn't care less if you use a mac, a pc, or a toaster to program. I bought a PC with the intention of being able to run as many programming languages as possible as easy as possible. My issue is with the idiots who think mac is awesome for no reason other than the apple logo on the back, of which they don't even understand the story behind it. It's stupid to buy any brand of computer simply because of its name. I bought my computer to program and made sure it was well equipped to do so before I showed up to school. Clearly some people in my class didn't.
Bail has nothing to do with crime, it's all about how the prosecutor/judge feel about how likely you are to show up to a hearing. Yes, accused murderers can (rarely) get bail. So, a crackhead with no money, no car, and a low likelyhood of fleeing may get bail but a multimillionaire who has a history of fleeing (In Mr. Dotcom's case he left both Germany and Hong Kong while investigations were on-going in the past) will not. Bail is designed to ensure the accused shows up to court. I'm assuming that New Zealand is modeled after the UK system of justice, so: >The main reasons for refusing bail (in the UK system) are that the defendant is accused of an imprisonable offence and there are substantial grounds for believing that the defendant would: > 1.Abscond > 2.Commit further offences while on bail > 3.Interfere with witnesses[5] And a perusal of [legislation.nz.gov finds]( that they have the same rules. So: [Baltimore crackhead murder suspect gets bail]( but [Bernie Madoff doesn't]( From arstechnica's profile on Kim: >With insider trading charges pending over LetsBuyIt, Schmitz decided it was time to lay low (by his standards); "in fear for his life," he fled to Thailand in January of 2002. whoops! >As it turned out, Thailand wasn't happy to see him. He was promptly arrested and fast-track deported to Germany to stand trial. hmmm..... >he was sentenced to 20 months probation and slapped with a €100,000 fine. In 2003, he pled guilty to embezzlement charges over the Monkey "loan" and received another two years of probation. >After the law's repeated lashes with a wet noodle, Schmitz left Germany and moved to Hong Kong to start the next level of Mega-insanity. >At about the same time he was trying to get investors to bite on Trendax, Schmitz was building a virtual business empire by recycling his old company names in Hong Kong. In February of 2003, according to Hong Kong government company registry data obtained by Ars—at the same time he registered Trendax— he set up the business entity Data Protect Limited, the company that would later become Megaupload. He also registered Kimvestor Limited and in March registered Monkey Limited. Kimvestor and Monkey shared the same virtual address with Trendax; Data Protect (and later Megaupload) had a post-office box as a point of contact. later: >Married with three children, Dotcom eventually decided to move to New Zealand to better enjoy his wealth and toys.
CCNP and network admin here. I will be the first to agree that Cisco has made some big mistakes, but this, while frustrating to their small office/home office customers, is barely a blip on the radar for their market share. When it comes to IP networking, including on internet backbones and critical worldwide infrastructure, Cisco is far and above the largest single provider of equipment. Not only that, but the amount of saturation they have in corporate mind-share, loyalty and cutting-edge research they have is staggering. If you study networking, you read a Cisco book. You likely study for your Cisco certification (the industry gold standard), take a Cisco exam, and then get a job configuring, deploying and maintaining Cisco kit. Even if your devices aren't made by Cisco, they likely run on protocols and standards based on research Cisco pioneered and put into products before anyone else. Single devices for (mid to large) corporations can cost from the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's before licensing and ongoing support costs. Finally as has been mentioned, Cisco knows how to lock-in customers--every Cisco product in your infrastructure is all but guaranteed to play nicer with other Cisco tech than with any other brand, and the more you buy the better deals you get on the latest and greatest, and the more their salespeople are willing to move numbers in your favor to maintain what you have.
I wonder how I can explain this... Cisco owns the internet. They're like the road. You might use different cars to drive on it, you might not even drive on the road all the time, but if you drive, you will probably use the road. Cisco is in every ISP and makes up the backbone of the internet. In fact, just about every piece of networking equipment out there is tested to make sure it works with Cisco equipment before it's launched. Chances are this is a very targeted marketing point where if you have a slightly larger than small business where you would need a just slightly more powerful than a WRT45 or the like, they'll sell the router and provide updates for it if you subscribe, since you're much too busy to handle it yourself but not a big enough business to hire an IT guy/department, but can afford $30-40 a month for a subscription. They will not pay for it now. The thousands they lose from whatever kids they've pissed off on the internet will have no impact on their 100 billion dollar company.
The title is ridiculous and greatly over exaggerated. I'm a network engineer and deal with tons of Cisco/Foundry/Juniper/Brocade equipment and could absolutely not care less about what Cisco does to it's consumer line. None of these changes will bear any effect on the enterprise equipment. It's like threatening to never buy a XR 12000 because your home WRT54g failed. It definitely is a nuisance for the consumer owners of this ONE $160 MODEL and I feel that they shouldn't have allowed this specific firmware to be sent through their auto-update system, but us enterprise guys don't do autoupdates- and we don't go near a firmware without confirming features/bugs via community/TAC. With that said, if you're a "Network Administrator" and allow any critical equpiment (SAN, L2, L3) in your "corporate" network to have their firmware auto-updated then you're in the wrong field. This entire "Cloud Router" thing Cisco is going for here is most likely an attempt to wrangle in people deploying Meraki equipment for it's cloud features.
FYI there is a difference in Non-Published and Non-Listed with most carriers. Non-Published means that your number won't be published in the phone book, but it will still be available to people who call Directory Assistance. Non-Listed means that it is not in the phone book, and it is not in the directory listings that the operators use for Directory Assistance. Directory Listings are a major pain in the ass for the phone companies because while the paper directory is only updated once a year, the database is updated constantly. Think about how big a deal a business would make if they got left out of the phone book. Now multiply that by 100 and that's how pissed off someone is when they don't want their number in the book and it is. To alleviate the pain of both the phone companies charge businesses a ton for Yellow page listings and charge regular consumers a small amount to be left out of the book.
I was paying an insane amount of money for just a few shows. I had the same setup as the guy in the article. I was paying 150 a month for somewhat speedy internet, and basic cable. The promise was 20 bucks a month. Then they tack on other things, like renting the box, and fee's and taxes. I have not had cable television for about 6 months. I don't regret it at all. I can just borrow, or stream everything. It may take me an extra week or more to see that cool new show everyone is talking about. But I don't care. I spent the extra 60 bucks a month on faster internet, and put some in my savings.
Toshiba are a bunch of crooks! I bought a laptop for school for 1,500. Hard drive crashes two weeks after I bought it just before my exams. Exchanged it at the store, fast forward 3 months just before exams. Hard drive decides to crash again. Toshiba then tells me under the warranty it would cost 150 to send the stupid thing by courier a short bit away from where I live. They also tell me they will assess it at their factory and if it is deemed to be my fault they would charge me for the repairs. Took it to a computer shop had a sea gate drive put in for 200...
Knowing this, the simplest solution avoid Toshiba products. If they are being such assholes about this, who knows what else they are involved in. Extreme greed has many facets. Toshiba products are also probably chock-full of " planned-obsolescence " faults.
I used to work at an authorized Toshiba repair center and based on that, I would say this completely has to do with their revenue from the repair business. Becoming an authorized Toshiba repair center requires a licence in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But when you get that, you have a lot less competition because of the technologies, manuals, support, etc that you get from them. You also can only order laptop parts if you are authorized, which makes it pretty difficult to repair hardware failures even if you can disassemble the laptop. Toshiba does not want you or some random company to repair the laptop, they want their repair centers to.
This will probably fall to the bottom here, but lets get some perspective here: Large companies like Toshiba have legal teams whose sole objective is to protect copyright infringements. Repair manuals are copyrighted. The legal team is doing it's job. This does not mean some cackling-profit-mongering-evil-corporate-marketing-villain is trying to take this gentleman's site down. I'm sure 99.99% of Toshiba is unaware of this situation. Don't let a bunch of stuffy lawyers tarnish your opinion on an otherwise reliable laptop manufacturer. If anything, email the marketing department. They'll want to put a stop to bad PR like this, and I'm sure nobody really cares if people hack away at their laptops with guidance.
Slightly related: Years ago I purchased concert tickets for myself and a friend, he was going to pay me back with money he had in Paypal. When he did the transfer, in the comments he jokingly wrote " Thank you for the cocaine ". Apparently that raised a red-flag at Paypal and my account that I had for years was immediately closed and I had to fight to even get my money back.
At least they did him the courtesy of pointing out what they found, as in listing the invoices they claim were a violation. I had a similar problem with Google AdSense in which I received a vague email telling me I was in violation of their policy regarding adult content. My account was permanently disabled, my site was blacklisted, and I was given no chance to appeal it. They did not link me to any of the content the found, they provided no possible options for recourse, and I had no warning it was about to happen. I don't own any sites that have "adult material" on them, so to this day I'm still at a loss for what it was they found, as I've been over my sites many times and found nothing of the sort. They just took the $300 I was waiting for them to transfer to my bank, banned my account, and put their fingers in their ears so I couldn't speak reason to them. It was the most frustrating experience and I haven't had the energy to put my trust in any company since then. I only use paypal now to transfer small amounts from clients after reading about people getting screwed through them. Despite being shady, and the crappy "paypal currency conversion rates" that make $300 USD turn into $288 CAD despite our dollars being much closer to parity, they still have the best transfer times and fees for someone in my position.
A few years back, I was buying and selling un cut currencies from the BEP. THey were getting me a bit of profit margin since people really like them uncut. Anyway, I started having the BEP shipped stuff to me house. THen I just drop ship it from the BEP to the customer's address. Customer open a paypal despute saying he didnt get shit, even though the BEP showed that it was delivered and signed for. I spoke with paypal and got the rep from the BEP on the line telliing paypel that it was delivered. Paypal still returned the bastard's money.
I had something similar happen to my PayPal account, years ago. My wife ordered a gift for me, and the company's site was having some issues and they charged her 5 times for the 1 gift, which came out to about 5 $100 charges. Since PayPal uses a credit card, we ended up just calling the credit card company and cancelling the 4 erroneous charges, leaving just the 1 that was supposed to happen. After this PayPal immediately, without contacting me, locks my account and then recharges me the $400. The credit card company told us there was nothing we could do. We tried contacting PayPal about it and they said for security reasons that we could only dispute this via snail mail (physical mail). In addition to only being able to mail them physically, we couldn't just send them a letter, we had to wait for them to mail us the form, then we could mail it back to them. Well, the form from them never arrived. When we contacted them to ask about the form they said that they already sent it and they were not allowed to send more than one form. So, at this point I could not dispute my claim for the $400, and could not reactivate my paypal account. How did I proceed? Luckily my dad happened to work there, I emailed him the clusterfuck that had occurred and he quickly got PayPal to refund me the $400, but couldn't get the account reactivated. I now have to use a different account, and in addition to that I cannot use the credit card that I used on the original account because that number is permanently banned from PayPal.
Recently I exceeded my annual receive limit on PayPal which was £1,900; fair enough. Therefore my account was limited and the funds and pretty much useless at the moment. I had to provide full identification so I could prove my identity and have my account restored, so I do as they ask. Eventually the proof gets denied and my account is limited until 15th March, bear in mind this was around September. They never gave me a valid reason for denying my claim, so I email them: automated response which is in no relation to my question. So, I ring them. I get put through to a woman who still fails to give me a valid reason except for saying "to protect PayPal's security". I stayed on the line for a while and the woman just was silent and had nothing to say, no matter how many times I asked her why. So I had to just leave it, I could do nothing about it. When it came to Christmas, I had to buy presents from eBay I couldn't use my PayPal account of course, nor my debit card because it was linked to that account, so I had to borrow someone else's. I don't trust PayPal whatsoever, I have emailed them several times and they have completely ignored me. It pisses me off because a previous PayPal account was hacked and after ringing them every day and trying to sort it out, we ended up having to say good bye to the good £100 on the account as they pretty much said we (shared account) were the people who hacked it. My recent account set up with my business, had a PayPal card and everything, and it's got my £200 in it. Please don't trust PayPal unless you really have a plan and know what you're doing. Sorry for the essay, i would enjoy hearing your PayPal stories too if you have any.
I don't use or promote anybody that does. they are scamming pieces of shit. I sold about 8 things on ebay and was saving my money til I turned 18... a few weeks afterI was 18 I went on a trip and wanted to use some of my money (about $60 of 1200). and lafter signing in it locked my account because I was on a different ip.. they just put me int a vicous circle of calling people. in the end they say that I'm not who I say I am and lock my account permenatly. they stole the first 1000 I made. I saif fuck that and filled police reports and with the bbb.
They suck as much as they are awesome. With ebay they realy protect the buyer but that's as helpful as the buyer is honest. I'm pretty honest so when I never got things I ordered or something was WAY different than shown getting my money back was very simple which was nice 'cause the seller was being a douche. Also helped when I "joined" Who's Who thing and they started charging me a monthly thing I did not sign up for which they said I did and long argument ensued but Paypal backed me and I got my money back after doing some paperwork.
Something similar happened to me, when I was selling stuff on ebay. Some buyer tried to scam me and claim the product I gave him wasn't the right one and then requested a refund without returning the product. And instead, of hearing my side of the story paypal instantly gave away a refund, which made my account go negative and they froze my account. Then they charged me a negative interest until i paid off the difference. Eventually, I proved that he didn't return the product, but only after a month of hassle and having a manager of UPS call paypal to prove my story. After all this I lost about 200 hundred dollars in negative interest, which I never got back because they said I should have paid off the negative balance, even though it was there mistake.
Seriously fuck paypal. I used to sell shoes all the time. Then one time the guy I sold them to said the shoes were stolen off his porch when delivered. I said I was sorry but after I shipped the shoes thats not my problem since he was the one that paid for shipping, he had the opportunity to pay for insurance but chose not to. He had the tracking number and I even text the dude a picture of the shipping receipt. But he filed a claim with paypal and they sided with the him, even though I had proof that the shoes had been shipped. So paypal goes into my account and took out the money and refunded it to the other guy so my account remains frozen and negative to this day because of that. Its bull shit because I had been selling stuff for years and built up a good reputation and positive feedback. Now people think im going to scam them because I only accept money orders.
I sent high dollar item to South America. Item was tracked into country. Buyer says he never received the item, though it showed it went through customs. Paypal ordered me to pay. I was out high dollar item and cost I was supposed to be paid. USPS would not accept insurance claim as they showed it go into customs with no issues. Connected bank account debited for amount without my authorization.
Even if you don't leave money in their they can still ruin you. Ebay/etsy store and your account is frozen? Good bye sales. Also if someone wants a charge back on something they got from you, pay pal will take them up on it, charge you the legal fee, and then if they fail you still lost money from the charge back. This all happened to my mother. She sold a 60 dollar item with signed comformation for the shipping, was signed but she got a chargeback and the 50 dollar legal fee.
IMO if youre able look for one of those Credit / Debit cards, use it to shop on line and never deal with pay pal again. Unless im missing something, or youre buying direct from people online not using any service, i dont see why youd need PP beyond an alternative to giving a full blown CC number, CVV, Exp on line. Which the credit / debit covers, you could even make it a seperate account and only transfer as much as you are spending into it to increase security.

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