Posts by MacGyver

It's simple math..

150,000,000 downloads at $ 0.25 + 10,000 illegal downloads @ $0 = $37,500,000

7,500,000 downloads at $ 5.00 + 142,500,000 illegal downloads @ $0 = $37,500,000

The end result is the same, the only difference is the amount of "criminals" that were created.

The problem is they see that simple math and say, "yeah, but if we sell those 150 million d/l at $5 we would make a lot more money." the reality is they won't and can't so all they are doing is forcing people into illegal distribution methods to appease their media wants. The whole "stealing is wrong" attitude is childish at best, we are not talking about finite objects being moved around, we are talking about ideas, and ideas will always spread and get copied. The most they can hope for is to find a price that people will pay for something that they could get for free if they just used a Tivo. For the "people should be paid" crowd, a TV show's production costs are paid for by the network and the commercials sold on that network when it airs. The value of that media after it airs is icing on the cake, they can set any value they wish, but people will only ever pay what they think is fair.

It really just depends on the countries' laws doesn't it?

I'm sure that there is a country somewhere that has no laws with regards to "likenesses" of people, and if they aren't part of the WTO, short of having the state department setup a trade embargo against them, I don't think there is precious little Apple or anyone could do to stop it.

Imagine if it were Iran that was making the doll, do you think that Apple would go there to fight this? I bet not. Hell I bet companies in Iran frame "cease and desist" letters from U.S. attorneys, and mount them on the wall the way red-necks mount elk heads.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

The scariest thing are the people that fall for this kind of thing, they have been given a job by someone somewhere to be able to have the money to lose in this kind of scam. I wouldn't let the people that fall for this kind of scam make the decision "paper or plastic" on their own, let alone any other more important decision. Where do the "victims" work?

@gratou

I know now; I was just making sure everyone else does too. I thought it was relevant to the VM issue.

@Michael W.

When one of your family comes over for the holidays and asks for an aspirin do you also slap the bottle out of their hands and scream "Buy your own god-damned aspirin!, this is mine and I paid for it?"

I don't normally attack individuals, but really, you're going to go with the "no sharing" argument?

They were talking about "IP" that the person already had in their possession, either by legal or illegal means. You "renting them your DVD (hereto known as IP) for $0 (hereto known as FREE)", is also considered IP theft by the media companies. Did they open the new package, thereby agreeing to all T&C? Are you licensed like Blockbuster? Then you too are a thief.

"As it happens, no one's ever asked"

No kidding, they already know and understand that you are a programmed shill for big media companies. I already know it, and I've only read a few sentences from you.

The whole world is where it is from humans helping and sharing with others, and you come along after the initial buildup, and declare that "all sharing is bad", and people should only enjoy something if they have paid some piper somewhere, and you think you're not programmed?

(by the by, people aren't even taking about simply not wanting to pay, they are talking about not being offered something worth paying for (DRM'd), or something not even available to be paid for (region locked))

I may not be morally spotless, but you are just wrong, maybe one day you will understand why, but I doubt it.

I somewhat agree..

I would say that we should have put all of China (hell, each country) on concurrent 8-bit subnets that way it would be easier to block the whole country if need be. Case in point, I have hundreds of random port scan attempts on my personal home network daily. I have blocked most of China's' 8-bit address blocks, but they are so spread out, that it is not as simple as blocking 123.xxx.xxx.xxx to 156.xxx.xxx.xxx.

I have so many 8-bit subnets blocked, that my routers block list is full, this wouldn't have been as issue or as much trouble if their address were concurrent. There is no reason that their country should be allowed to port scan private networks all over the whole world all day long.

For all those coming down on LarsG, take a look at your firewall logs, and then look up where those "unauthorized access attempt" IPs originate, 99% are from China. I can't imagine what would happen if someone put a computer on the internet without a firewall nowadays, 8 years ago when I was in Korea, if you put a new computer on the internet for updates, it was infected before the updates were finished installing, I can imagine it has only gotten worse.

I wonder how much of the bandwidth usage on the internet are port scans (from China or otherwise)?

Or just build a cabinet...

You can build a whole arcade cabinet from scratch for less money than an iPad.

Just search for "arcadecontrols" and "HAPP", believe it or not, the hardest part to find is the damn CRT monitor. It is a nightmare to find a rounded 27" CRT CGA/VGA/SVGA monitor these days.

If only they made 4:3 LCD monitors in that size it might be an ok substitution, but they don't, and 16:9 looks all kinds of wrong in an arcade machine.

Oh, so they pay $49 per DVD for everyone, everytime? Right.

I wonder how they kept track in the year 30 AD, did they send out checks, or was it gold, and did they pay out yearly? What about 1960, was it weekly then?

Arg.

Hydrogen again? I thought that had been put to bed already.

Where is all this hydrogen going to come from? From electrolysis, using electricity.

Like the other poster said, you can't compress hydrogen, unless it's at CRAZY pressures.

Hydrogen does burn more cleanly, but it still has exhaust gasses.

Do you have any idea what kind of nightmare it is going to be when little 16-year old Suzy crashes her shiny Hydrogen car and the giant invisible fireball kills everything in a 2 block radius?

Battery density is getting better every year, they ARE recyclable and why not use the electricity to move you directly from a battery, rather than to make hydrogen first and then burn it (the efficiency of hydrogen goes out the window when you factor in it's creation, and the fact that you are now still using an ICE).

Hydrogen was the carrot they tied to a stick to try to make you forget about electric cars. Hybrids were what they tried to give us after they tried to scare us off with crappy ranges. Now they have somehow made EV into a non-green choice?

EVs from 1990 where good enough for %80 of today's drivers, and if the electricity comes from renewables (solar, wind, wave), they are super green.

The reason they (car manufactures) don't want you to have an EV; lack of required maintenance. A hybrid is three times as complicated as either an ICE or an EV, and will need lots of parts and lots of special tools to fix. EVs compared to an ICE have hardly any consumable products in them for you to need to replace (sans battery obviously). No plugs, hoses, lifters, rods, pistons, rotors, high voltage coils, seals, and a whole bunch of other things I can't think of right now. Some EVs don't even need a transmission.

Battery tech is what is costing so much, and that won't last for ever.

Still not impossible...

I'm not the biggest Trekkie but, it would be cool if someone took her collected voice-over work and broke it down into the basic phoneme elements, balanced them all, and then used them with a nice TTS engine. If for no other reason than to preserve her Star Trek work for posterity.

I wouldn't mind the idea of living forever if only in voice.

Do you like wearing a suit, or do you like to feel important by wearing a suit?

A 3-piece suit has what, 5 layers of clothing, an undershirt, shirt, vest, jacket, then another thing wrapped around your neck. Are you planning to fix banking databases or prepping for your first walk outside the Lunar Lander?

If you asked me what I was wearing at 10am without me being able to look, I couldn't tell you. I don't care, it doesn't matter. All that matters is if it was clean, and was hanging up in the closet.

I'm not saying we should wear "Bikini Inspector" tee-shirts to work, just that we should be comfortable. Clothing should be clean and neat, and depending on who you interact with, maybe not carry any logos or words.

I agree, sort of

One life lost is bad, however........subjecting 300,000,000 people to a law to save 3,000 doesn't make sense. You can save twice that by making all forms of swimming illegal, doesn't mean we should. All that number tells me, is that 3,000 people weren't able to do those two tasks at the same time as well as the other millions of drivers.

I have driven in lots of places around the globe, and one thing is clear; some people just shouldn't be allowed to drive. Give those people a cell phone, a cute pedestrian, a another car wreck, or pretty scenery, and guess what happens.

Make my cell phone turn off in the car, and I'll buy one from China that won't. My guess is the phone carriers are dreaming this law up as a way to cut their usage by a third, and they won't have to move the your call between cells as much. Or it will be just another law that we all will break, and can be used to punish us at any time.

"No officer, I wasn't talking on my hands-free, I'm schizophrenic."

I agree..

Not only would they have to find and match the signal coming in, and be able to track it, then crack and decrypt the control signal, block the real one, then in the span of 5 minutes; dissect the signal, figure out the control interface protocol, then find someone that can write the program to talk to the control interface, then find a pilot to be able to fly a tail-less remote control plane blind on a mocked-up control panel, unless we are also talking about them being able to decode and display the video data in real-time too. I think not.

They've obviously have been watching too much CSI.

Maybe they have just been planning this for awhile, even still, I think the CSI Miami guys would have a hard time pulling this off, and they can pull cell phone data out of phones wirelessly on their magic table without even touching the phone.

My guess, they jammed the signal and the real one fell out of the sky, and smashed into lots of small pieces, and this is their mockup of what they think it looked like. Or, that given a situation where there is a lack of a control signal this thing is programmed to "land" on it's own (I certainly would hope not).

Never seen any show with them really in it.

But if the skits they do on Saturday Night Live about them is any indication, they are annoying sounding ignorant wastes of space and the "Kim" one is their leader. Oh, and one or all have rather large derrières.

and next time..

He may as well say, "While you're at it, fix all the things!" Then we can all live in peace and no one will ever be sad again.

I'm surprised that they were able to:

1) Find all the web sites.

2) Order a sample from all 200 sites.

3) Put each of the 200 cataloged samples in a gas-chromatograph-mass-spectrometer.

4) List the exact chemical make-up of each proving they are in fact knock-offs.

5) Prove all this in one court in one state in one country.

6) Expect the every person in the world to jump into action to help stop this horrible scourge of selling fake crap to cheap/ignorant people.

Really, Channel perfume for only $2, what a bargin, seems legit, where can I put my credit card info in?

Not sure what you are talking about on the ad thing though.

What exactly is an "ad"? The last ad I saw was something about "punching a monkey".

On the matter of spam, I get none. My sock-puppet however gets nothing but, well maybe the occasional free user validation email confirmation.

The free content providers are playing a game where they try to sell my habits and data, and I play on the other side, where I try to thwart them. May the best man win.

Facebook without user content is worthless, why would I pay for something that uses me to make others pay for seeing the things I myself had to pay to create. See how much that makes sense? It doesn't.

I know.

That makes me insane to no end. "You are out of blue, so I'm afraid I can't print the all black and white thing you wanted." I would accept a box saying "Out of Blue, print anyway? Yes/No" , but to stop working completely, that's Draconian.

Agree.

I have OpenELEC and XBMC running on 4 TVs in my house, the only thing really missing is a backend server running a 4-tuner PVR, but they are working on the PVR side of XBMC, so hopefully soon I'll be able to fill in the missing piece.

Running a full OS on a TV is silly; "Hold on family, I need to check my email in front of all of you really quick." Maybe in Ubuntu's universe their in-box isn't filled with penis enlargement spam.

"I know you were watching Simpsons, and I'm gonna let you finish, but...."

It's simple..

Just figure out what went wrong by retrieving it, and bringing it back down in the Space Shuttle, oh wait, never-mind.

I guess we'll just have to live with; "Computer, broken!"

Except, no.

You can guess colors and passwords all day long, but if that email content was deemed special, it wasn't on a computer connected to the internet, and if it was, the original F.BI guy would be in jail for putting it there.

Governments also don't have BBS's running on their missile launching computers that like to play tic-tac-toe in their off time with anyone that happens to have a 1200 bps modem.

All this talk of a tic-tac-toe playing computer is making me crave Burger King for some reason.

Couldn't have put it better myself zanto.

I can't wait until they come up with a hybrid, one that has a normal LCD back-lit display for your standard tablet features, and then the content from that screen being pushed into a normally transparent Mirasol-style e-ink display mounted above it as a power saving mode or for reading e-books or magazines.

While I'm dreaming, they should throw in a sliding keyboard while they're at it, a la Samsung PC7 (TX100).

So.

Are the by-products from burning fossil good for anyone, no. So maybe we are causing it, maybe not, but why not ween ourselves off of non-renewable sources while we still have choices.

I have been in a city where the daily forecast advises that you avoid going outside as much as possible. So we need to doing something about air quality anyway, even if it isn't the cause of the ice caps melting or crazy weather.

I do want to make one thing absolutely clear though, there should be non of this "carbon credit crap", the last thing we need in this world is another stock-market style entity where people can learn to play the market to fill their pockets instead of keeping the air clean.

re: reproduced in buffers

So every provider is breaking copyright law when a Netflix stream is going through their routers?

Hell, TVs buffer incoming signals too.

Going after them because the signals sit in their buffers is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. They are definitely grasping at straws.

I can wait until a large company, Google, cough, decides to give us all what we have been asking for for years, and starts dealing with production companies directly. Imagine a website where you can sign up, pay 30 dollars (or pounds) a month, and you get to pick which shows you want.

There would be no reason to need commercials, ($30 x 100 million people = $3 billion dollars).

There would be no "Neilson Ratings", we choose what we want, and if not enough people like it, it's dropped. No more "Firefly" issues happening.

They could set it up with an open API for the streaming, so Roku, Boxee, and XBMC could work.

There would be no broadcast restrictions, because it's not being broadcast. (Like HBO, Showtime).

Because they are paying for the shows to be created, they would be able to distribute them however they decide.

It will happen, just not in our lifetime, even though there is no good reason for it not to right now, other than cable companies like the way it is now.