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I think I can help as far as what your employers can know and what they can't know. I'm a Social Media Investigator which means I do background checks online of people applying to jobs (and who have jobs) via request of the employer. I am FCRA (Federal Credit Reporting Act) certified which means I am trained in this particular law and department (social media + employment). Most of what I do is FOR THE EMPLOYEE'S benefit. We are mediators because the employer is not allowed to view your social media freely because it exposes them to sensitive material that they're not allowed to know (gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, familial status, place of birth, ethnicity, the list goes on). This means, if you get hired or are hired and there is ANY indication that your employer has seen your social media and is thus treating you differently, not hiring you, firing you, etc, you can sue for discrimination. ALL background checks, including social media checks, must be with written and clear consent from the subject (the employee). We have to redact (black-out) any protected class by the federal government and by individual states that apply (varies per company). When we do reports on people and find their Facebook, for instance, we black out ALL images, gender, hometown, if they're married, etc. When you do all that, a Facebook looks pretty blank. Yeah, the employer can bypass our screenshot and go to the link, but they are exposing themselves to protected information and are asking for a lawsuit. We ONLY report when a potential employee has drug, alcohol, violence, or sexually explicit content online, and even then, we still black-out/blur protected classes and non-relevant images. Your employer and your social media do not have to coincide. You are protected by discrimination laws for this. If your employer types your name into Google, they are ASKING for a discrimination case. If your employer finds your Facebook, they are ASKING to be sued. When your employer hires a company like mine to do a social media background investigation, be happy, because while we might report you for drinking underage, we will protect your personal life and details that should not and do not have any bearing on whether or not you should get or have a job.

Not having Facebook, or not having any internet account - that's connectible to your "real self", is an effective solution. I know it's a dusty old custom of the Aged Digital Immigrant tribe. I also it has served me well since raw telnet days. Invent all the online personas you want, and with them explore your interests and express your opinions. You don't have to share all interests and hobbies with potential employers. If asked, remember you're selling yourself. Pick a couple you know they'll like, or at least find unremarkable, like reading biographies or woodland hikes. No need to mention video games or your guro collection. If job or school requires you to have Facebook, Twitter etc under your real name, use that account only for what it must be used for, and nothing else. It takes a handful of mouse clicks to clear tracks and log back in as the persona you use to email mom, or your BFF. The you of 2023 will thank you for it.

Everyone tries to game Reddit. It's usually more profitable to just try to game Reddit than risk being caught. And in this case, it was a rumor started by Reddit in the first place! Stop bitching about the X1 until E3 and until more details are conclusively known. Can't believe this is the top post on the site right now.

How do people think they are able to search their mail boxes for old emails if they aren't scanned? Further when signing up we are informed that their systems look at the emails in order for you to search them. It is even mentioned in the TOS that this is necessary for some of the functionality of their services. This is just silly and is becoming a band wagon that I really wish some courts and people would just get off already. To those who complain it is an invasion of privacy, I ask this did you read the privacy section of the TOS when you signed up for whatever email service you are using? Google straight up told you that emails are scanned and when they introduced the ad placement their TOS was updated and you had to click that you agreed to it. I guarantee no matter what email service you use online if you have a search box that allows you to query your inbox or other folders to find old emails they scan your emails for keywords. Yahoo does the same thing but I don't hear people up in arms over it, know why? It isn't the popular thing to do right now just like beating up on Microsoft was the in thing to do back in the late 90s early 00s.

Israel is ~8000 square miles. That's smaller than New Jersey. It's much easier to deploy infrastructure to cover a dense area than a large sprawling area.

Dead? I would like to see that in writing somewhere. I think this is a common misconception among some of us Seattleites. McGinn supported it greatly and was going to push it, but that didn't mean he controlled it completely. When asked if he had plans to change anything about the Gigabit plans in any way, Murray said no. Flat out. Comcast was not funding against Gigabit Seattle, and that they had donated to Murray 4 months before he had even announced he was running for Mayor. >"We've had several thousand contributions to this campaign over the last 11 months, but I've now had a chance to look up the Comcast donation. It was a donation to Ed's legislative race, originally made in August 2012. After Ed announced he was running for mayor in early December, the contribution was converted over (along with dozens of others) to the mayoral race account prior to a fundraising freeze (according to Washington State law, state officials can not raise money for any political campaign from 30 days before the start of a legislative session, until it ends) that went into effect on December 15." - [ARS Technica](

Yeah the average internet connection speed in Australia is 4.8mbps compared to 8.7mbps in the US. Perhaps more telling is the % of people with connections over 10mbps, Australia 5.1% vs the United States at 24%. Source:

compression is everywhere, everything you see on the internet is compressed to some degree. OP's article is just stating that mozilla has discovered a more efficient algorithm for doing a standardized type of compression. Improvements in compression means the same thing can be sent over the internet faster (it's now smaller, yet contains the same level of quality). this means that you could actually send/download/share a higher quality photo within the same file size of the old algorithm, effectively improving image quality.

i made a reply to you, but i didn't want it to be buried (since this thread has been downvoted to oblivion) so i put it at the [top level](

If all of the heat was used, you'd be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. For work to be done, like driving a car forwards or generating electricity through coal- or gas-firing plant, you have to have a difference in temperature. This difference in temperature determines maximum efficiency. For example, cars are a max of 30% efficient or so (correct me Reddit), so for every 3 gallons of gas you put in, about 2 of them come out as exhaust. If you had 100% efficiency, you would have to have 0 degrees K, or absolute zero to do so. This, of course, is physically impossible.

I read it on a TIL:where the government said something and the entire engineer staff call the paper pushers idiots and built their walls 3 times as high and all kinds of reasonable shit.

Creating fusion is relatively easy. Thermonuclear bombs have been doing it for decades. Tomahawk fusion reactors have been around for a long time too. Its getting a net positive, controllable power output that's the issue. An H-bomb gives out a net positive power output but its not controllable. Tomahawk reactors are controllable but not net positive in energy generation. ITER, the fusion power plant you mention, its not a secret at all, uses a new technique to create fusion products using lasers. Their hope is that the laser approach will be efficient enough to actually generate usable power.

The flaw was reported to the ASUS and the company quietly included an undocumented fix in firmware 3.0.0.4.376.1123 to resolve this vulnerability.

I posted this the last time this story was linked via Ars Technica. Much of it still applies to this article. The headline is extremely misleading. PLEASE READ THIS: THE ARSTECHNICA SUMMARY IS FALSE The problem is Ars Technica is simply regurgitating defense claims, which are naturally going to be as sensational and exceptional as possible. It's quite common for the defense to make many claims that they never substantiate or later use in court. These claims are DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY THE FBI AFFIDAVIT, yet ArsTechnica doesn't tell you that. Here is the affidavit for those who want to read: "The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested" There is no indication of this in the Affidavit. Even if it did happen, evidence from such an event wasn't used. "The notion that an individual “consents” to such searches—so that the government is free to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s explicit warrant requirement—is, in a word, absurd. Our lives cannot be private—and our personal relationships intimate—if each physical connection that links our homes to the outside world doubles as a ready-made excuse for the government to conduct a secret, suspicionless, warrantless search." EXCEPT NO SUCH SEARCH WAS CONDUCTED. Rather, agents entered the home and observed things in plain sight. This is entirely legal, and no search warrant is deemed necessary in such cases. The reason is pretty clear: if a cop accidentally stumbles onto a drug lab, he doesn't have to leave and go get a search warrant while the criminal quickly packs up his shit and drives away. "Nowhere in the search warrant request, however, did the authorities mention that they saw supposed wagering on computers after posing as technicians who in reality briefly disconnected the Internet." This is patently false. Firstly, it leaves out the fact that the hotel employees saw it, and told "the authorities". Here's a quote from Page 5 Line 5 of the affidavit regarding Electrical Engineer J.S., an employee: "J.S. stated that he/she observed computer screens which look just like the ones in the casino's sports book." Secondly, later they DID come back with "the authorities", and those authorities DID see it as well. Page 7 Line 9: "SA Kung saw PHUA sitting at a laptop computer which was displaying both the website "SBOBET" and an active instant messaging window. SAs Kung and Lopez observed PHUA clicking on numbers, which SA Lopez believes, based on his training and experience, were sports wagering odds, within the SBOBET website. SA Kung observer an incoming message to PHUA stating "good luck on the hedge bet" or similar wordings."

It is a shame, because I think that this is why traffic into the U.S. (which benefits us economically and goes both ways) is so far down. I know in my state traffic from Canada is way down. I have only been to Canada once since after 9/11. Before that I had never had any issues crossing. They pulled us over and did a full search of my vehicle, they found nothing of course. In the meantime, we are stuck in this station and it takes awhile, and I had to pee. They had an agent (or w.e they are called) follow me into the toilet and watch me pee, I had to leave the stall door open. I was instructed not to flush so she could look in the toilet. I understand the reasoning, I could have 'flushed' something, but being treated like a criminal for no reason, and I mean they treated us like filthy criminals, I have never wanted to go back. It is pretty demeaning to have someone watch you piss. I'm an asshole though, so I was like you want a look at this, well here it is baby, legs spread full vag for you to see. Of course I kept full on eye contact while relieving myself because at that point it had been an hour and I was pissed they wasted my time, also the lady (and I use that term loosely) just seemed like she was positive they were going to find something in our car. Of course they didn't find anything, and they seemed soooo disappointed. They still treated us like crap and sent us on our way. We turned around and went back to the U.S. It is a shame because a large group of us used to go there weekly and we spent a lot of money. We were also questioned, but that would make my story too long, which it already is.

I was detained twice when entering Canada from the US. Different provinces, different circumstances. Once in an airport and once at the border. In the airport i sat in a small room with two pissed off normal middle aged guys (who happened to have brown skin) for a half hour or so until I was summoned into another room while I watched two agents go through everything in my bags while asking me dozens of personal questions. Where did i go to college? Do I have a girlfriend? What's her name? What are her parents' names? What do they do for a living? So on and so on. One of the agents said like she knew of the college I went to, where it was, etc. Which was complete bullshit, because it was a tiny college in a tiny town 3000 miles away from where i was in Canada. I didn't realize it at the time, but everything they said was just intimidation. I should have kept my mouth shut and not answered any of their questions, but I was young and dumb. Eventually, they figured out that they had nothing on me and escorted me to my plane, which had been held for me. The other incident was at the US/Canada border entering Canada where my girlfriend and I where rudely instructed to park our rental car, go inside, sit right here, and wait while they searched our car. While we waited, agents walked back and forth in their black military style uniforms glaring at us like they were daring one us to open our mouths and protest. We didn't. They eventually let us go, with an attitude like we didn't have a right to enter their country. On they way back into the US, we braced ourselves for some more bullshit. We pulled up to the border agent, he asked if we were US citizens, he waved us on.

No. Windows upgrade has never in the past left the previous license. Whether it was genuine or not, all that will remain is the new license. Windows has "allowed" pirated upgrades without drama for a long time. Technically, since you didn't follow the terms of service (which says only install on legitimate windows) then the windows 10 copy is considered to be "not genuine", however, there will be nothing at all to ever indicate this or catch you out on it. Thing is, "upgrading" windows used to be more expensive than buying an OEM copy. So there was no drama from microsoft with allowing pirated copies to upgrade, since they were making even more money. So no, windows genuine will always show windows 10 as genuine, even after upgrading from pirated software. JUST LIKE IT HAS FOR EVERY OTHER UPGRADE BEFORE IT. Of course I'm not sure on this, but considering this is how they've done upgrades forever, and the info that non-genuine will be upgradable, I'm pretty sure this is the deal.

Somone give me the

The following line summarises the entire article nicely; >They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn't a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. Because that's the way things work in all businesses, right? And then we get the personal opinions of several people none of whom would be classed as the above - A Teacher (they can afford one?), A DJ, A painter, a scientist and a woman that runs her own business who's apparently unaware that you can call landlines from skype (but even she recognises that the keyboard isn't very good). I was hoping that the article would give examples of companies that had tested the ipad and found genuine business reasons for giving them to employees, but what you actually get is "They ARE good! Look! Look at all these people that say so!"

I decided not to watch their crappy movie to begin with. In fact, of all the movies up for best picture that year, it was the only one I didn't see (and by the way, I did pay to see all of these movies legally). I didn't like the fact that they were actually encouraging the Academy to vote for their movie because it's SOOOO important.

Actually, Google+ doesn't even see your +1 clicks, which makes no sense at all… it only adds them to your profile page, if you enable that tab for people to see.

This article is a piece of shit. First off, its needlessly emotionally charged. Second, Android is Linux. Third, wtf does this mean: >Google has a deep problem here. It hates the idea of intellectual property (except its own) Has Google ever sued anyone else over IP? Serious question.

shipped= very, very close to sold. think about it. a)brick and mortar companies (i.e. best buy) have a finite amount of shelf space and they aren't going to keep ordering shipments if they're not selling, and b)a lot of these things, i'd imagine, are being sold on the internet in which it is much easier to match supply and demand (faster flow of information=being able to more flexibly and precisely place orders) which obviously leads to a smaller gap between "shipped" items and "sold" items.

Apple copies one thing (notification pane)... Fandroids never stop talking about... Eric Schmidt helps change Android in its entirety to work with a touch screen and look more like iOS after he was on the Board of Directors of Apple, saw the unreleased iPhone, and Google had just bought Android... Fandroids act like it never happened.

Coming from an employee that has said android tablets in retail store with an apple store in the same shopping mall, every fucking customer wants a fucking ipad and we will never carry them because our cost is apples retail cost

So would you agree with this statement: The "age of piracy" has hurt artists that are up and coming AND trying to get a contract with a major label. The reason I say this, is that total revenue for the music industry has been growing steadily, the only thing that has dropped massively is the sale of full albums. Labels made most of their money on albums (as opposed to artists who typically make most of their money performing live [at least that is what all the musicians I know tell me]). The major labels still want their scrilla, so they squeeze the new guys. To me it seems like small label and independent local musicians are significantly benefiting from it considering revenue for live performances is significantly up even though we are in the middle of a huge recession. Anything that is going to increase your exposure (and with that, assuming you don't suck, the ability to book larger/more profitable venues) is going to be a positive impact. Perhaps my opinion is clouded though, as I live in a place where indie bands flourish and people regularly go see live performances. I may not feel that way if I lived in oklahoma or some other shitty place like that.

One thing you might want to check with your pirate bay "FLACs" though is a spectrogram of the files. A lot of times, you'll see they aren't lossless at all, there will be sharp cutoffs in the upper register indicating that the music has indeed been compressed to a lossy format at some point, and just resaved as .FLAC to make it more appealing for people to download. You get bigger files with no improved fidelity, awesome! Or even worse, you'll get something like a 320 mp3 transcoded to AAC, then back to v0 mp3 then back up to 320 over the course of a year and multiple reuploads (like for instance, when somebody compresses the "FLAC" from the first example, not knowing they're actually doing a lossy to lossy transcode) that's going to sound like complete ass. Point being: some of those high bitrate files may still have quality issues. Private trackers like What.cd or waffles.fm don't have that problem; uploads like that get removed and the guy who uploaded that garbage gets the banhammer shoved up his ass.

I agree with you second statement but disagree with your so comment. The mining company has a fairly sustainable business with high revenues (low margins). However Facebook doesn't have a set direction with its company. If people look to MySpace and Friendster as well as pets.com they'll see how turbulent the Internet (tech) industry can be not everyone can pull a google.

Success" is defined differently depending on perspective. The goal of the IPO for the company is to make as much money as possible... they want to sell off a large part of the ownership of the company in exchange for cash money. And naturally, their goal is to get as much cash money as possible. "Success" for brokerages can be completely different. In fact, it can be completely different IPO to IPO. Completely different IPOs can be considered "successful" if they met the goals of the moment, whether it is a high price that drops or a low price that climbs. But I think there can be an "objective success", one that isn't measured from the against the goals of a specific stakeholder but instead is measured in terms of satisfying the market. Part of that, imho, is that the stock trades at a stable price, with a slight initial climb commensurate with a high trading volume. That would indicate that the company stock was sold at what it was worth, the stakeholders received face value, and the ownership of stock has gone from company to underwriter to public, as it "should." An IPO is a zero sum game... if someone makes out like a bandit, someone else got hosed. If the stock was massively undervalued and the first people in at the ground floor make a killing on the climb then the company failed to capitalize according to true value. If the opposite happened, the company bilked the public. In this case, not only did the stock sell for more than it was worth (putting more investor money in FB's pockets), the underwriters told selected private investors that they did not think the stock would perform at $38 and was really valued less. These investors could sit out the initial trading and losses, while the general public would hop onto the hype train at $38 and lose money. In that sense, there was an ad hoc collusion between FB, the underwriters, and the private investors that were warned about the value of the stock. Morgan Stanley did take a lower commission, but they also have their green shoe that allows them to make money shorting the stock if the stock price drops. If there was collusion, this was a way for them to cash in on it even further under the guise of boosting trading. At the end of the day, I don't see this IPO meeting any sense of being "objectively successful." It was successful for certain players that were able to rake in more money at the expense of the public, mainly as a result of [disparities in how private investors were informed versus the public](/ However, this could backfire in that Facebook's name is being tarnished and FB and/or underwriters are possibly exposed to lawsuits. So even from the perspective of Facebook, this IPO could turn out to be a failure despite the initial success in capitalizing.

This. If you are living in Greater Vancouver, definitely try Novus if you can. I live in a crowded apartment around Metrotown where Shaw internet crap down to 1~3Mb/s for download and 0.3Mb/s for upload after 6PM. Called Shaw Customer service many times, usually said somewhere along the line "it's our peak time now, we can't help it". After 5 years with Shaw's pain-net, I just basically fk it and switched to Novus from last year, ever since my internet gets actual 18~20Mb/s for download and 9Mb/s for upload. It blows my mind completely. I mean, OMG, My speedtest.net result showed 9Mb/s for upload speed??? Everyday??? Never seen that with Shaw before.

Yeah well, it's also faster than the average Telus customer. I am a Telus Optik subscriber and I bundle my Phone, TV and Internet. Granted, I chose to pick 9 HD packages + I pay another $10 for a-la-carte channels (with their HD counterpart) for TV, my monthly Telus bill (not including Telus Mobility) is around $170. That also includes HD PVR rental which I get at a slight discount because I signed for 2 years (not mandatory, I willingly signed up for that) Silver lining is I just built a house and moved in this past June, and I have fiber straight to the house. Obviously not taking advantage of it, but the potential is there.

Had a somewhat similar thing happen with rogers (doesn't deserve capitalization). I got a blackberry (this was about 4 years ago) and I was supposed to get a mail in rebate for $50. It took me calling them on the phone every day for 4 months to actually get it. Later, after getting overcharged on multiple occasions and them refusing to fix the mistake permanently so it wouldn't keep happening, I went to cancel my contract with them. I was told by everyone I spoke to about it that it would cost $300 to cancel the contract early. I cancelled it and when I got my final bill, the total was over $700. No one ever told me there was an extra huge fee for cancelling a blackberry contract. By the way, half of the time my phone wouldn't even connect to my email anyway.

I'll give you an example. When I was living with my parents and my little sister, we were on Shaw's highest speed/highest capped plan in Calgary. Our total allotted cap? 500GB. Our usage per month? On average 1TB. We don't own a cable or sattelite TV package, yet we watched EVERY TV show and movie that came out. We torrent EVERYTHING, stream it to our hdtv via an o-play box. Between my sister and her music, me and my games/movies/music/Netflix my parents with movies (Atleast 3 a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, all MKV Blu-ray quality) We never had to pay for the extra bandwidth, we were just harassed by Shaw to 'Please stop exceeding our bandwidth cap' Apparently they weren't allowed to charge us, but the law was changing soon, blah blah.

Negative. From the beginning, the shuttle had many objectives that were not generally know to the public. The problem was that NASA's aim of pure research was never an option with Defense so involved in the project. The result was a compromise that achieved few of either agencies goals, but was still much more than just a hauler. It became a pawn in the cold war. It presented such a strategic advantage, that the Soviets tried to copy it with their failed Buran shuttles. The way we look at the shuttle now is not the way we looked at it in the 80's. Almost all of it's early missions were defense related and science missions were relegated to any spare room they could find. When the cold war ended, we found ourselves stuck with an imperfect science platform, but made the best of it.

It's the license we are given that I have an issue which is at the essence of the original link. When you buy a CD or record we are getting something tangible that we can one day pass on to another person, or perhaps even sell to a used record store. In this way we can even get some money back on what we purchase down the line, and perhaps even make some money off a rare collectible CD or record. Essentially a music collection that is predominately on a tangible medium is a giant personal asset. The same can't be said for an MP3 collection. No one is buying limited edition MP3s or selling back some MP3 albums to buy new ones. So people already don't even value their own music. This is what I think is leading the industry into possibly creating a future disposable music paradigm. Where all this seems to be headed is for us to pay for each individual play. That or our media will expire pretty rapidly. You think I am kidding? The music industry wishes they could make everyone pay to play a song back one time. Put a quarter in the jukebox essentially. They want you to have to renew your media every so often but they are running out of reasons why you should be purchasing the same thing over-and-over. First they created the greatest hit compilation. Next we got digitally remastered versions, box sets, import version, the live concert VHS, the HD version and blue ray. Still that game only lasts for so long. We can only digitally remaster Dark Side of the Moon so many times. So now the industry has a big problem with digital copies and piracy. This completely eliminates the need for consumers to perpetually purchase the same thing every so often. Companies involved with publishing music expect their music library/catalog to be able to generate revenue for 100+ years. That's roughly how long you can extend a copyright's ownership before it goes into the public domain. The next logical step for them will be to make your collection rapidly expire and force everyone to always renew their music collection. If they can prevent piracy in the ways that they to want, when the advantage becomes theirs again they are going to recoup all those years of lost profits. They have zero love for consumers now that they feel we have been stealing from them for the last decade or so. We'll have to go along with the program or we will never hear our favorite songs again. Bitch all we want but until our money hits their pocket we won't get to hear a damn thing. Of course this can be circumvented but they'll label us a criminal for doing so. This isn't even that big of a stretch to what they have been already been doing to businesses. ASCAP recoups money for artists from restaurants, clubs, and anywhere else music is played. Companies can't simply play music in their store silly! They have to pay for using the musician's songs to promote their business. They want to know what you play, how often etc, etc. And yes ASCAP and BMI are both integral elements of the music industry. It's essentially taking that mentality and applying it to consumers as well as businesses. Right now though we have a choice and we don't have to support the digital distribution system at all. Give it the finger because it really sucks as I am about to show you now. It's really only about convenience and nothing more. If ppl stopped and really thought about the whole thing for a minute they'd realize what a crap deal they are getting when they buy a license to an MP3. This is my last point and then I am done I promise. Let's say an CD has 18 songs on it. If you buy the album as individual licensed MP3s that will cost you $18. Let's now assume this is an old 80's Madonna album ... for fun. So you get the 320kbps version, because you "care" about fidelity - keep telling yourself that. Even at 320kbps an MP3 is 1/4 the size of its .wav counterpart. So even at 320kbps your fidelity is in the crapper. MP3 codecs destroy audio in many different ways to reduce the size by 3/4's ... I won't go over right now. Just so you know there are many people who can totally hear the differences b/w .wavs and 320kbps in the same way many ppl can see the difference b/w something printed at 72dpi or 300dpi. I won't even get into the differences b/w a record and a CD, let's just say it's not good. Okay so what's my point? Well when we buy a license to an MP3 we are super selling ourselves short. Both in fidelity and also in price. We wouldn't buy some moldy, ugly-ass orange for the same price as a beautiful all organic orange if they are sitting right next to each other. Yet this is exactly what we do when we buy a license to an MP3. The option in this example (the 18 track Madonna album) is that we could buy the CD used and just rip the .wavs for ourselves. Space is so cheap now why anyone still uses MP3s for their personal collection at all is beyond me. Once again convenience. We think we need to carry around a public library's worth of music with us at all times. We are allowed to backup your tangible mediums so you are not committing any crime. How much do you think a used Madonna CD costs from a used record store? Most used CDs right now are insanely cheap. For example Like A Virgin - the digitally remastered version too - is on sale used at Amazon for a whopping $.13. Like A Virgin actually has 11 tracks when you buy a license to the MP3s and you'll spend $11 roughly. Do I really need to illustrate anything else here? I think you can figure the rest of it out for yourself. As far as durability goes vinyl destroys CDs. I have well over 3k records and in over 20 years of owning them I have "ruined" one record ... in the sun like a dumbass while I was DJ'ing. CDs I have destroyed almost my entire collection twice over. Don't even mention tapes. lol Vinyl is the superior medium, period. It has so far outlasted everything that was supposed to "be the end of it".

I tried the initial release candidate trial and found it a hassle, hated the metro launcher and felt crippled without the start menu and it was hastily dismissed. A coworker with an MSDN account gave me a key and an iso and told me to just keep working with it as we eventually will have to start servicing/troubleshooting win8 computers at work. After a few days and installing Pokki to get not just a start menu but also some handy options to disable the corner shortcuts, boot straight to the classic desktop, windows keyboard key pulls up start menu, etc as well as adding favourite apps/etc to the start menu. I'm actually starting to warm up to it but I'm also not gaming on it either nor do I have plans to. I haven't had any issues with drivers, incompatible programs or anything. I'm glad I gave it a second chance but to be honest, it's nothing I would pay money to go to if I were already using win7. It literally offers me nothing (that I can see at this point) that is considered "must have" that win7 doesn't offer and I'm afraid that it will probably be the same for a lot of people who aren't in situations FORCING them to use Win8. I honestly think that my biggest gripe is how disconnected working in metro feels vs working with the standard desktop. The metro apps like the weather, messaging, calendar, etc just aren't that good and the fact that I don't use a microsoft account makes them even more useless. Google has an answer for just about everything that is tied into both my phone, email, cloud based music, google drive, etc.. so for me, none of that stuff Win8 tries to give me really works and web browsing or weather in a web browser is far more useful and easy to use than the actual win8 apps themselves it seems. Honestly I think that if I already used a windows phone and used those microsoft account features and apps, windows 8 would be more appealing. I see it very similarly to how the iOS works well for those with apple devices, itunes/icloud, etc.

ride Windows into a closed garden like iOS and Android? To hell with Microsoft's money-making scheme Ugh. Please stop repeating this like everyone else. You only make yourself look stupid. No one is making serious money via their Store. . Over the first 3 years of the App Stores existence, the estimated profit is $100M per year.^1 So Apple brings in $25M per quarter! Wow. That's almost close to the $8200M they total they had last quarter.... . According to BusinessInsider, Apps are < 1% of profit. How about a second source. Trefis breaks down stock price. According to Trefis, the entire App Store PLUS iTunes music/video profits is 3.3% ^2 .

Apple App Store initial release July 10, 2008 Business Insider (BI) Article July 11, 2011 Where or where are you getting 6/7 years. As I said, "over the first 3 years". I was not incorrect. Now onto the second part. You are correct there is growth which isn't accounted for in the BI article as it is a year old. However the Trefis estimate is obviously current at 3.3%. Let's take a look at the article you have shared. $1900M in revenue in Q2. The BI article claims that Apple only takes in 13% of this revenue after CC fees, so $247M. (Now I'm not entirely sure if the 13% is taking into account the cost to provide all the free apps, but for now lets assume best case that it is). Again, according to your article they brought in $11.6B in profit that quarter. Some quick math... 2% of profit. Heck, even if BI is wrong, $1.9B revenue / $39.2B total revenue is <5% .

Hi. Normal guy here. After I'm done playing FPS's, (first person shooters) the last thing I feel like doing is shooting a human. That's actually why I use a technical medium. (i.e. computer, xbox, etc) No sense in life in prison when i can kill hordes of imaginary targets on screen, go to the kitchen to eat a steak, and sleep on memory foam.

If you're starting from scratch, it may be worth looking more towards HTML5 and css3. There are some differences between HTML5 and the current HTML4.01 standards, and they are enough to change the way sites can be built. I am only just starting to look at HTML5 and css3 myself and after years of web dev, can't wait to get my teeth into it properly. Also, the new features css3 can take over from javascript for the purposes of animating buttons etc. CMS wise, I use Drupal. In all honesty you can get away with absolutely no coding or HTML and produce a great looking site. The bit you may have fun with is the theming. However, start from scratch to learn the basics; the markup a CMS can generate can be daunting (~cough~ Drupal ~cough~).

Say "No" to node. Seriously. Javascript is not a language that was structured to be run on the backend of any system. Believe it or not, the reason it's gotten so much hype is because of the reason you specified. Frontend devs don't know PHP, Python, or *shudders* Ruby, so they use Node. Honestly I'd suggest people learn basic programming theory with an easy, made-to-help-you-learn language like Small Basic (which was designed for children, so it's not difficult to learn), and go from there. It's also worth noting that developing websites/webapps is a lot easier than writing compilable programs (you don't have to deal with compiler settings, linking, dependencies, etc), so it is probably a decent place to start. So if you guys really have your heart set on learning a few web-based languages, I'd suggest learning them in this order: HTML/CSS (not really languages - just markup but who cares) Javascript (along with some of the more popular libraries/frameworks - jquery, bootstrap, etc). I would like to note that [Bootstrap]( is great for creating quick prototypes of websites, but unless you customize it a ton, your site will look like every other site on the internet that some college hipster tosses up for his new "startup". PHP or Python, along with messing around with some of the more popular plugins/libraries Whatever database management software fits your project the best (MySQL, NoSQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, etc) Back when I was first learning to program when I was 14 I used which has tons of video tutorials for just about every language that are tailored specifically for those who have absolutely no knowledge in programming, programming theory, and all other specified subjects involved with the field. They also have many video tutorials on things like Photoshop, 3D modeling/animation, database administration, and game development (both with more hands on stuff like Delphi/C++ with DirectX/SDL, and with game development software such as Unity3D). If you're on windows, I'd suggest trying out XAMPP, which is a local development stack that includes: Apache - which is your local webserver (basically allows you to go to and display your site there) MySQL - your database management service. It lets you store and access data and do what you want with it. PHP - the backend language that powers your application (it communicates with MySQL and also does server-sided logic to make your shit work) phpMyAdmin - a simple MySQL management GUI written in PHP that allows you to create, modify, and delete databases, rows, and data within said rows. And alternative is WAMP, however I'm not a fan of it and rarely used it, but it's nearly the same thing.

EDIT: I was wrong. I was horribly wrong. Ignore this whole comment if you can, but I'll leave it up so others can know what went wrong here. I'd say that if you know JavaScript (taught in CodeCademy), you know the basics in C++ as well. You'll need to learn about the Standard Template Library, data structures, and more advanced things by yourself, but as far as basic things go (and a major part of the syntax of both languages), JavaScript and C++ sort of feel the same. Just focus on the basics, and, well, any other language will come naturally. Except for HTML and CSS, or so I've heard. I haven't tried them out yet. :I

It is a bit odd that the DoJ has chosen to go after the non-dumping non-monopolist in the ebook business. It's clear that Amazon has used their dominant position in retail to reduce book prices to uncompetitive and unfair levels. Why shouldn't book producers have the right to set their own prices? Amazon's sub-1% margins would be seen as dumping in any other industry.

Copyright is a rights issue. Duplication of information. Theft is a property issue. There is a reason we cant use the same laws for the virtual/imaginary as we do for the physical. You really need to re-examine your totalitarian point of view. Your argument boils down to "the law says so". Awesome. The law in your region at this current time. Do you even know all the laws in your region? There are hundreds of new laws enacted every year in the USA alone. How many have you broken today? Odds are you wouldn't even know. But remember, according to "the law" you're a criminal just as much as those you lament for piracy. No matter how mundane the law might be, you've broken one. So should you be punished just like rape or murder? As per your example.

Let me preface this by saying I think the government was completely in the wrong by taking people's legal data Allow me to play devils advocate for a second, imagine if you had a bike and stored it in a warehouse ran by a shady guy who steals cars and holds them there. Your bike is completely legal but one day the police raid the storage facility and take your bike to hold as evidence. It's sucks the police took your bike and it may not be completely legal but at the same time you should have know better not to associate with shady people.

If you look at the "evidence" it gets worse. Megaupload had a user upload something that wasn't their own IP. Normally, this gets reported and the host service removes it - this is how the entire internet works, and you've certainly seen the "removed" pages on Youtube plenty of times to be familiar with this. For this case, the US government said directly to Megaupload "keep that file up, we're working on an investigation and want to see who is downloading that file, yadayadayada" so Megaupload complied with the request and didn't remove the offending file. Then Megaupload is held accountable for not deleting that file by complying with the people later used that request as "evidence." That's what this case is over. The "evidence" works against the US, and there was never an intent to put this into a courtroom - it's all been an attempt to discredit and bankrupt Megaupload and Dotcom, after both the man and the company stood against SOPA publicly. There has been other "evidence" mined from seized servers, etc, but all of that evidence stems from the fruit of the poisoned tree that started the whole thing.

But those other expenses are not the record label's responsibility. The argument here is that when a hit song becomes successful, he performer is 40% responsible for it's success, the label is 44% responsible, the songwriter is 3% responsible, ASCAP (without whom the artist would be at risk of having their intellectual property stolen or misappropriated) is 1% responsible, the session musicians are 4% responsible, and the Publisher is 3% responsible (and SoundExchange isn't responsible for the songs success at all, their 5% cut is for acting as a payment processor, like Ebay fees). The label's job is to pay for studio time, advertising and promotion, distribution, and to keep lawyers on retainer, among other responsibilities. The responsibilities of the record label are different from the responsibilities of ASCAP, the performer, the songwriter, the session musicians, and the publisher. Expecting the label to eat these expenses is unreasonable. The label does their job, and the other parties also do their job.

Well... it's not that simple, and it's not 50/50 with the bands, almost ever. A publisher works with the song-writers. The publisher is paid for uses of the song, and often negotiates uses. They collect the money for those uses (as well as for statutory payments like terrestrial radio and legit online radio). They then, based on agreements with the writer(s), pay the share of those royalties to those writers. It can be 50/50 if there's one writer, or can be different. A high-profile songwriter can negotiate a much more favorable (to the writer) deal. If there is more than one writer, the split is whatever those writers agreed to - it may be 50/50 for two writer (of the portion paid by the publishers). Then there is the band, which may or may not have any of the song's writers as members. The band will be paid for units sold (whatever that is - record, CD, etc.), and for paid downloads. In a traditional record label, this is a vanishingly tiny percentage of the sale. Very few signed bands can even make a meager living for its members off of this income alone. The writers typically make out much better. On youtube, it is not exactly true either that the revenue is split between the record company and the band (after Google's share). It is paid to the rights holder(s) of the video (and any music on the video). Typically this would be the label and/or the publisher, depending on the exact deal regarding video usage online. The performers (the band, and possibly but rarely session musicians) are supposed to be paid for online plays via SoundExchange (in the US). [Here is SoundExchange's list of payees]( Notably missing is YouTube and Google. They do not pay performance rights, and for the life of me, I don't know why. Possibly because technically they are not "internet radio". Both Pandora, iTunes/Apple and Spotify are on the list of payees, however, as is Facebook. Myspace seems a glaring omission.

I don't think this is true. I flit around the edges of a specific west coast music scene, and i don't see anyone making much money in it. Venue costs are highway robbery, merch doesn't make a whole lot of money unless you have a shitload of fans at the venue just for you (you probably won't have that for years, if ever), and nobody cares about your album because they don't like you enough to buy it, and if you hand them out like candy, it's not making you a load of money. Even if you managed to get your local band onto Pandora (and it's happened before), you're still limited to people actually stumbling upon it and liking it. The odds are not all that high, and you're unlikely to make much of a fanbase from it. The record label's big appeal is that they arrange for your little local band to tour around in places that aren't local. They set up shows for every night of the month, and they even cover the gas to get there (sometimes). This gets you way more fans, because the audience you're being put in front of already wants to listen to your genre, and see your type of performance. They can interact with you afterward, and you meet other bands and performers which you can network with. Like any industry, networking in music is crucial .

I had to take a counter-intelligence polygraph when I was in the Air Force. After taking it the first time, I was almost denied my clearance because they said, "You didn't have enough of a physiological response during your control questions, so we couldn't establish a baseline" - or some shit like that. I'm no sociopath, nor am I some expertly trained FSB sleeper agent - I just don't have a strong physical response to lying. I had to knowingly exaggerate what I believed to be the physical responses (heart rate, BP, breathing rate, etc) to pass my bullshit polygraph.

Actually, my username comes from a love of out-of-date scientific "knowledge." A 19th century biologist named Philip Sclater proposed the idea of a "lost continent" that once existed between Madagascar and India based on fossil evidence surrounding the evolution of lemurs. Due to his lemur-based theory, he called the continent Lemuria. Incidentally, Lemuria also shows up in late 19th and early 20th century pulp novels as an "Atlantis like" lost society. Dozens of authors over the years have used it for all sorts of craziness. Some of them even believed in it enough to include it in their real-world esoteric cults.

The way Silk Road was set up, the owner doesn't have any of the vendors personal information. AFAIK, the only purpose of the Silk Road was to exchange vendor and customer contact information. It is up to them to establish that communication; many did it without encryption. People felt safe enough to not care about encryption, which means they probably fell victim to other attacks. One of the easiest methods anyone could do; would be to get their computer to execute a script which would perform a wireless poll and send them nearby access points. Then all you need to do is send the Access Points and signal strength to google and it would give you a really good location of where they are. It doesn't matter if you use TOR/VPN/Proxy/etc because this would be ran locally on their machine then sent out. If they don't have a wireless card, then traceroutes can be used to get a better location than an IP Address. Is Tor completely compromised? I doubt it but even if it was, it is so widely used for anonymity; I doubt any organization would say it is for obvious reasons. If you have TOR Nodes, traffic will pass through you and there are ways to force a path. When the data passes through you and its unencrypted you can see what is going on. Which is important because the vendors were huge and accepted unencrypted traffic which means; I could either contact the vendor and infect him OR wait for a file to be sent unencrypted which he trusts and modify it to track him.

What they're describing sounds a bit like wireless DWDM (in principle). Developed by Bell Labs in the 1990s, Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing basically applies fourier transform principles in reverse, using various wavelengths of light as digital carriers multiplexed for many times the signal of one collimated beam at a single frequency. DWDM led to massive increases in ATM switching throughput, when in 1997 Bell Labs researchers transmitted the (then) per-second traffic of the global internet over 400km on a single optical fiber.... Yes, I'm a walking encyclopedia and no I didn't Google that. I worked for Lucent in the 90s. :)

In most developing countries, condoms are free. In most developing countries, people still don't used them, because expecially men "don't like them". In most developing countries, high birth rates are a main contributor to poverty. etc etc.

What i'm trying to say is that in developing countries there is no money anyway so even if there are amazing thin condoms that prevent accidental childbirth it wont make a difference because rape will still be extremely high... also people hate the idea of condoms not the feeling.

most bacteria goes airborne in the bathroom when you flush. Correct, but people in public bathrooms are flushing all the time, meaning the air is filled with bacteria. Also, the toilets lack lids, so there's nothing to moderate the spray.

The whole reason net neutrality is a big issue is two-fold: unfortunately underdeveloped property rights with regards to cable lines and ground access generally firstly, and secondly and more important actually are regulations at every level from the feds on down which restrict competition in line-laying and service provision. Many counties and municipalities demand that companies provide access to a whole community if they want to introduce any cable at all, and then charge far higher fees for regulatory compliance and right of way access than either rightly demands (regulatory compliance costs are generally far fucked for the entire economy, so that's nothing peculiar to ISPs and cable companies). To make matters yet worse, they impose all sorts of asinine restrictions and demands on the ISPs beyond where they may (or must ) provide service, sometimes demanding free or cut-rate cable and internet access for county and municipal buildings. Oh, and the local utility providers, who are usually monopolies overseen by the municipality or county also jump in and throw on ridiculous costs to soak the ISP and cable companies further. What does all this mean practically? Functionally, it's almost impossible for upstart cable providers. Even Google is experiencing problems in this regard, and thus the spread of Google Fiber is impressively underwhelming. That means that the industry is dominated almost entirely by a few giants (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner) which also tend to exert local monopolies and therefore charge exorbitant rates and show great reluctance to expand into areas already dominated by one of their competitors. This means that functionally, there is actually very little competition in service between the cable companies; the competition lies at getting first access to an area, and once that has happened the prospect for any competitor emerging in that area is minute if we look at the country as a whole. Should we be surprised by the overwhelming collaboration with the NSA, FBI, RIAA/MPAA? Should we be surprised by policies which are detrimental to customer satisfaction and rates which are far higher than they would be in a competitive marketplace? No, not really. After all, satellite companies are the only functional service competition to most of these territorial monopolies, and they can't compete with cable with regard to latency or reliability. What you see in this industry is no peculiar example of an industry in dire need of yet more regulation than they already suffer; it's a classic monopoly problem, the same you see already in utilities of all sorts (and in the insurance industry in several states among others - the government industry, for instance, which is the most expensive single item and yet which provides the least services per dollar). Of course, the states, counties, and every other level of government which imposes regulations tell us that it's for the benefit of consumers, but that's a blatant lie. These regulations serve the large extant providers, render newcomers virtually impossible, and on net impose substantial costs well beyond any possible benefit. Inviting the FCC or some offshoot organization is probably only going to make matters worse. What wonders the FCC did for broadcast radio and television! Me likes censorship and mandated programming! THINK ABOUT THE CHRILDEN THINK ABOUT BABBY

This is their line of thinking... Their business model is based off of providing content. TNT, CNN, FOX, HBO, etc. They charge you for that, and then require that certain high profile, highly desirable content is "bundled" in such a way that you must now purchase everything before you can get what you want. So, now their business model is threatened with the advent of content makers going to other providers on the web, and even content makers switching to content provider services. So now, the content providers are seeing competition and are thinking "well shit... these are our lines people are using to get content, what should we do"? They are using the same business model to attempt to solve a problem that they see as revenue and power loss.

fast lanes is just a euphemism. imagine you have a law to prevent toxic waste dumping in lakes. but then you sell special barrels that you can fill with toxic waste and dump it in lakes. those special barrels, are fast lanes. ostensibly you can say it's still illegal to dump toxic waste, but we have an allowance for it that you have to pay extra for. except this analogy isn't even as bad as fast lanes cause public money was spent to build the infrastructure for isp's, and they're not even upgrading any tech, they're just pulling bandwidth from everyone else to provide a "fast lane."

Language changes. PC, as part of our lexicon no longer means "personal computer". It now means a computer running windows. This did come about from marketing, but not from Apple's. In the mid 80's IBM was in a rush to try and get a desktop computer on the market. They didn't have time to design and create their own internals like do on every other item they create. Apple, Commodore, Amiga, and all the others were eating their lunch. They took a bunch of off the shelf parts and created a computer. They though it was protected by their proprietary BIOS. They named and marketed this machine as the IBM PC. A couple years later Compaq managed to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS and released the first IBM PC Clone. These machines were also marketed with various usages of the term PC. That term differentiated them from not only Apple, but from the other competitors as well. Fast forward 30 years and the term has stuck. Personal Computers mean personal computers. However the term PC, to the majority of people has come to mean the evolution of the IBM PC. That evolution started as IBM PC's, then their clones, then WinTel machines, and now just Windows based PC's.

Headline: > Netflix Is Taking The Movie Theatre Industry Head On, And It Will Win Wow, what a bold headline! I can't wait to see what well-reasoned argument they make to support such a definitive conclusion! Many paragraphs later: > It’s hard to say how this new-age business war will play out.

He broke the law to make a point but couldn't handle the cost. I've zero sympathy for that. He could have gone to trial and fought the law he could have appealed a conviction if one had occurred and actually changed the law, but he wasn't actually interested in fighting for freedom of it cost him personally. That's the

see [Robin Hood]( [Ishikawa Goemon]( So now we have established the trope and that your question was ill thought, lets examine what the real question should be. Does Aaron Swartz deserve the comparison to RH and IG because he was a thief for good (robbing from the rich to give to the poor) or does he more deserve the comparison because of the fact that both mythologies have been embellished and added to and were probably not real? And before you send another rash, misinformed single line answer why not look into the situation in depth and try to put yourself in Aarons shoes for a moment. Please consider the following You cannot deny that he truly believed what he did was for the good of people and that he was justified The charges of persecution ring slightly true, due to the fact that the "victims" of Aarons crimes actually didn't want to prosecute him A man killed himself, that never a good thing so maybe a little empathy is in order even if you disagree with him. If you're interested this is my opinion on the case and a summary of the facts.

Here is how things work in America: A restaurant does well. They open a second location. Then a third. When you get more than three locations, then you stop being a restaurant, and start being a business. If you end up big enough, you become a corporation - and then the bad things happen. Corporations are obsessed with cutting costs. In the restaurant industry, that means cheaper and cheaper food, cheaper and cheaper labor, and therefore easier and easier processes. (The largest Italian "restaurant" in the US is the Olive Garden - all of their food comes frozen, in bags. The chefs - who make minimum wage - heat it up in a microwave. I am ashamed that the rest of my countrymen eat this shit.)So when a restaurant becomes extremely successful, it is almost a given that their quality starts to suffer. Because of those cost cutting measures, however, the big chains are always cheaper. So,

Math time! So the K-komputer is capable of about 10 Pflops. This simulation was only 1% of the brain. Meaning that you would need 1000 Pflops (1 exaflop) to simulate 100%. The simulation took 40 minutes (2400) seconds to run and only simulated 1 second of activity. So, to run a real time simulation we would need a 2 400 000 Pflops (2.4 Yflops) computer. The fastest supercomputer today is capable of a peak performance of 50 Pflops. Double that 16 times gives us 3 276 800 Petaflops. Assuming that supercomputers also follow moores law and double performance every 18 months. 16 doublings taking 18 months gives us 24 years.

I apologize that this is so brief, but this was originally a Reddit comment I wrote and was not intended to be a full post. At the bottom you can see further reflections. I find it hard to believe how confused some people are about why Paypal sucks. Just to make it clear I too hate Paypal, but their solution/reason it sucks is wrong. Lots of uneducated opinions in that thread (and I do mean uneducated as opposed to "disagrees with me"). Paypal has very little competition, because they are one of the only companies where you can make payments to almost anyone of importance in the world (not that people in Africa aren't important, but I don't need to do business with most of them). Their shady business practises wouldn't last very long if there were companies they had to compete with. This is from Peter Thiel's interview: >"With respects to finance we're generally in a more heavily regulated world [than when paypal started] and so it might actually be very difficult to start paypal today. I'm not even sure you could build paypal today, because the regulations are tougher. There was somewhat lawlessness, somewhat greyzone in 99/2000. Today it might be much harder to get started, much higher barrier to entry. [People are trying]. We're seeing much higher regulatory headwinds and that is a real worry." So today, lets say you want to start off in just the major economies (sorry, had to exclude a couple of places like China because I know little of their laws). Where do you need to be licensed? United Kingdom: Technically you can be licensed anywhere in Europe but this is where most Fintech companies choose to get licensed in Europe. You have the best access to lawyers, FinTech thinkers, etcetera in London. This comes under Electronic money regulations, and once licensed you can passport your license for free to the rest of Europe, as well as Switzerland. This will cost you a £5,000 fee (tragic) and you will have to prove that you hold 350,000 euros in liquid capital. Fairly reasonable but of course you have legal fees, and restrictions on what you can do (for example you cannot pay interest). You have a number of reporting requirements but nothing too heavy, really all you have to submit is suspicious activity reports. (Over simplification, but that is the main one). This process will take around 6 months. United States: You need 50 money transmitter licenses, and need to be a federally registered money service business. There are a large number of fees/capital adequacy issues. Most states require that you put funds into a special account that you cannot touch. The whole process takes years to become fully compliant. For example Pre-Cash started gaining their licenses in 2006 and gained new licenses as recently as 2014. Reporting is a nightmare, have to report which direction the wind is blowing when a customer walks through the door. Canada: You don't actually need to get a license, well done Canada! Australia: You need to become a licensed Financial Service, there are two levels of this - Wholesale and Retail. You can have just a Wholesale license which allows you to accept customers who meet the following criteria: >You intend to make every transfer in excess of AUD $500,000 (or equivalent). You are a business that employs 20 people or more (100 or more for businesses within the manufacturing industry). >You are a High Worth Individual (HWI) that: a. has a gross income for each of the last 2 financial years of at least AUD $250,000; or b. has net assets in excess of AUD $2.5 million (or equivalent); c. and can provide an accountant’s certificate dated no more than six months ago confirming one of the above. You are a business or trust that is controlled by a HWI that meets the criteria above. >You are deemed to be a Professional Investor by: a. holding a financial services licence or equivalent; b. being regulated by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) or equivalent; c. being registered under the Financial Corporation Act 1974; d. being a trustee of a superannuation fund, an approved deposit fund, a pooled superannuation trust or a public sector superannuation scheme and the fund, trust or scheme has net assets of at least $10 million; e. having or controlling gross assets in excess of $10 million (including any assets held by an associate or under a trust that you manage); f. being listed entity or a related body corporate of a listed entity; g. carrying on a business of investment in financial products, interests in land or other investments and for those purposes, investing funds received (directly or indirectly) following an offer or invitation to the public, within the meaning of section 82 of the Corporations Act 2001, the terms of which provided for the funds subscribed to be invested for those purposes. >You are a related body corporate of any body corporate that is a wholesale client. You need to have professional indemnity insurance, and be part of a dispute resolution that ASIC has approved of. Fees are pretty low on this one, less than $3,000 initially. However reporting is a different matter, you have to report an awful lot of stuff. Every transfer over x amount, etc. Can be automated though, mostly. New Zealand: Sort of regulated, sort of not. You have to register yourselves with the CO, however there is no licensing of the such. You need to register with a dispute resolution scheme if you want to accept retail customers. I don't know much about reporting here, sorry. Its pretty easy to get registered, in fact Bitcoinica was registered in New Zealand. And the best part? With all of these countries you must have an active staffed office, with senior members working at it. Of course, this is a very short list, with just the countries I've taken a glance at, but the list goes on. Most countries have licensing requirements - in Pakistan of all places it costs $2,000,000 to become licensed - and that is not as a bank! South Africa, Mexico, Japan, they all have their own requirements. And then you have risk. Banks are so over-regulated that they shit themselves whenever something is any one of the 50 shades of grey. Paypal found it easier to become a licensed bank in Luxembourg to accept debit/credit/other Euro payments than to work with banks directly as they could keep correspondent relations rather than current accounts. And then you get people who say shit like this: >While actively fighting being classified as a bank because then they would have to follow federal banking laws. Bravo, you dipshit. Lets take a market that is already full of crony-capitalism, and further increase barrier to entry. Someone get this guy a Nobel prize. There is complete disregard for the actual functions a bank performs. That is for valid reason: A bank accepts "deposits" (paypal doesn't), operates on fractional reserve (paypal doesn't), and issues debt/securities (paypal doesn't). Paypal is a payment system, is an issuer of electronic money. That is the "banking" services they offer, and there already is regulation for that in almost every first world country (minus Canada) and that is a money transmitter (US), or e-money issuer (EU)

It's not they haven't caught on... it's just the solution they chose out of the 4 possible routes. Here's eBay/PayPal's choices: 1) Ban the sale of MTG/CCG cards. 2) Eat the cost whenever a sale goes bad. 3) Tell the buyer he's fucked. 4) Refund the buyer and tell the seller he's fucked. OK. So #1 doesn't make sense because, believe it or not, these bad transactions are actually really, really rare overall. eBay/Paypal doesn't like #2 because of course they don't like to lose money. But it also makes it very easy for someone to duplicate money. One guy sells X and then he buys it on a separate account. He pays himself, disputes himself, gets refund on first account and presto, he doubled his money! Now the issue is, when it comes to a he said vs she said situation, does eBay do #3 or #4? I suppose they calculated that it's better to keep buyers buying than sellers selling. Cheaper customer acquisition cost and many large sellers just see it as "cost of doing business". So that's probably why they do it.

PayPal is complete BS. I was recently notified that my account was limited. Mind you this is an account that hasn't been active for 10 years as I thought it was closed. No problem, l'll just email them with the verified email to close the account. Nope. The account needs to be verified via call from the phone number that I had 10 years ago or the address I had 10 years ago. Mind you, I live in Korea now. I was hoping they would drop the account from lack of linked bank account or lack of any contact, but I guess it will just be an open security hole forever now.

I use PayPal to print shipping labels (because Amazon's a bunch of greedy little shits) and to buy music from various outlets. I have a separate bank account backing PayPal that isn't tied to, or accessible from, any other bank accounts. So PayPal can sieze the shit out of it, and, at most, they will be able to freeze maybe $50 in assets.

Which music sales have "plummeted", as you say? Medium, distribution, timeframe? And by how much? As compared to what? As compared to the anomalous time period where people essentially re-bought their music collection as they switched from LPs/cassette tape to CDs?

Ask yourself... In that case, it's a damn good question. Thanks for calling me out. Honestly, I would have to answer 'not enough'. Aside from bitching on the internet, I feel a bit helpless about it. One thing I am doing is trying to make other people realize what a slippery slope this is. It's the people who don't think these things are a big deal since they aren't affected directly or very often that worry me most, and there's a lot of them. Another thing is, I moved out of the U.S. almost two years ago. I moved for work and not only because of things like this, but it's because of things like this that motivate me to do everything I can to stay gone. The problem is, I want to come home to a country I'm proud of some day. I wish that Americans would come together and see that it's in their own best interests to be decent and tolerant of each other. I want for us to stop being divided into theological camps so easily. My dream would be for my fellow countrymen to completely stop working, paying taxes, or spending money until these abusive politicians and CEOs realize we're the ones in charge. We need to put fear into them. Only then will they start working for us.

I work for one of the top gaming blogs (not Kotaku, I swear) and this genuinely pisses me off. No, bloggers are not professional, even if we do get press passes sometimes. We are guerilla journalists who write about a topic because we legitimately care enough to do so. Some of us are really trying to be more professional (when I go to press events and talk with PR people, I comb my fucking hair and wear a shirt with a collar. How crazy is that?!) Some of us, however, do stuff like this, and further sully the title of "blogger." I get paid approximately jack shit for the video work and writing I do on my site (in the name of professionalism, I'm not gonna tell you which it is) but I get to do cool stuff (I'm sitting in an airport about to fly to Vegas to check out a game.) I'm working in an industry that I love and care about. During the week I'm a full-time barista, which means I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and make people lattés. It sucks, and I'm constantly exhausted. But I still put the rest of my energy into the site. It would be easy to tell the guys from the site, "this is amateur hour, you don't pay me enough, and you're all totally unprofessional" but I'm not gonna do that, because I'm getting to do cool stuff and getting exposure and working with a bunch of people who are also driven by a passionate appreciation for their hobby. I'm hanging tough, staying hungry, and working harder than I've ever worked before. That's why it pisses me off when a major blog runs something like this. Yes, blogs can get away with being less formal than print media, but just because it's casual doesn't mean you have to wear torn up baggy jeans with ketchup stains on them.

In the areas of knowing your own bias and self correction, Reddit does much better. For example, this thread is Ranked #1 at the moment. What makes this exceptional is when mistakes are made, sceptical redditors put their internet detective hat on and produce corrections which other truth seeking redditors seem to have a pattern of upvoting.

Not all that smart - plenty of other people were extolling the future of the internet in much the same terms when Gates was still busy writing the embarrassingly wrongheaded first edition . Then only weeks after he wrote the book Gates began to realise that this whole "internet" thing might actually not be the lame half-assed abortion he assumed it was, and he went back and substantially re-wrote TRA extolling the virtues and future of the internet and began a concerted effort to turn Microsoft into a more internet-centric company (well, in the sense of recognising it would be huge and immediately trying to "extend, embrace and extinguish" it). It's not stupid to have finally spotted the potential of the internet, but do bear in mind that plenty of people (technologists, business strategists and the like) were well aware of it already, and had been for years. Even at the time, for a technologist and IT-strategist I remember Gates was widely considered to be embarrassingly late to the party - by that point the internet access was already widely available to private individuals in residential areas, the web was coming on in leaps and bounds and the whole system was obviously far along in the process of morphing from an academic/government network into the mass-medium we know it as today. Jesus - I'd already seen the enormous potential and successfully bugged my parents into getting us a dial-up connection by the time TRA came out, and I was a clueless (if fairly technically-inclined) 14/15 year-old at the time!

This headline is misleading. IANAL, but [here is what an attorney commenter said in another thread about this.]( >First, its not that stealing code is not a crime under federal law, but rather it is not a crime under the National Stolen Property Act. There could be many other federal laws or theories he could be charged under. >Second, we are only talking about FEDERAL law. There are still state laws that could apply. In fact, things like theft are typically handled under state law. >Third, not only could there be state criminal charges, but there could be civil suits under both State and Federal law. >

All apps you've ever opened are always considered open, between sessions even, on Windows 8. The back-stack is a list of your most recently used apps. To move to a specific app in the backstack, tap its tile or use the app switcher interface (swipe in and out quickly on the left). This function lets you "close" apps (free them from RAM) by dragging them to the bottom of the screen. You can also dock apps to the left or right via this interface. Not sure that I've ever experiences this. Some of this will be fixed before RTM, others aren't issues at all. The desktop is an app. You can pin desktop apps to the start screen, or use start menu search exactly as before.

You can see where they're going though with these changes, though one day i suspect they will go too far. First they made laptop without a disk drive [MBA], then made moves towards owning a central software market controlled by them thus making downloading software + media the standard for their devices. With this battery move, i assume they are hoping to bridge the gap between the battery life of the Macbooks and an iPhone/iPad(under usage) so all portable products made by Apple follow a linear pattern(especially with the moves to make OSX more like iOS) each ascending in power, becoming slightly less portable, but still usable anytime throughout the day. Though the problem with this is that it heavily relies on research done by other firms and isn't under their direct control.

The base model 11' isn't 1600x900, nor is it 1920x1080. They're actually 1366x768... the same as the Macbook Air! Holy mother of...! I feel so violated right now. Asus (and most reviews) always advertise the Full HD display so i figured every Zenbook had it. The Amazon listings i was looking at don't even mention resolution at all. Pretty sneaky. > Both of those require an adapter to be used with any monitor or TV, so that cancels each other out You're ignoring the VGA which does come with an adapter. Any monitor and beamer i've seen has a VGA input. Thats not just personal experience, that's a statistical fact. The same can't be said for TB. So again, TB can only really play to it's strengths if you (re-)buy all your accessories and monitors. > Apple overcharges for their adapters. Everyone know this. Hence why you go to monoprice.com and buy from there whatever you might need for literally a few dollars. Yeah, but the Asus adapters are official adapters, not no-names. I'd think the official Apple adapters would be an apt comparison. >

I remember it differently. Notifications were broken from the start. If you received multiple of them, only the last one could be seen. Sure, badges on icons told you that something had occurred, but you had to launch the app to see what. This wasn't a big problem in the beginning, when there were less notifications. Same thing with the folders. Organizing apps into screenfuls was enough when there was only a handful of them. Hell, you only had the stock apps at first. Personally, I don't feel the folders are that elegant of a solution and the whole springboard could use an overhaul. I hadn't heard that one about multitasking before, but I have heard complaints about the lack of full multitasking, which the iOS still doesn't have. You do know, that on iOS apps recreate their previous state when you launch them (developer's responsibility) so that it doesn't really matter if the app was open in the background or suspended in memory? It has been so since the first iPhone and this isn't multitasking (although in most cases is indistinguishable from it). Multitasking only matters when the app needs to continuously do something while it's in the background. There are still restrictions to this but for example music, streaming and GPS are allowed. An IRC-client or SSH connections would be examples of use cases that don't really work in background on iOS. I haven't met a widget I thought was useful, so I don't really have anything to say about those. I also don't think the Metro way of showing a small sampling of info in small boxes is the best way to go about it for that matter (though I don't have real life experience of using a Metro device). And finally, what Apple says is just their marketing. Of course they'll say 3,5 inch screen is all you need, because that's all they offer. And by the way, it was more about making a device that fits well in your hand. At the time that translated to a screen size of 3,5". If they could put a bigger screen on a frame of the same size without compromising usability, then sure why not (not taking into account the issues it would cause software-wise for the apps). While I'm sure the quotations you provided have all occurred I do feel they reflect reality quite poorly.

I'm not sure where you got that data, but all Zenbook Primes (11" and 13") come with 1920x1080 displays. I'd say thats more than "slightly". Actually thank you for pointing that out... because we're both wrong! The base model 11' isn't 1600x900, nor is it 1920x1080. They're actually 1366x768... the same as the Macbook Air! 1920x1080 is available as an upgrade. [Source (click on full specs)]( And also while on that page, I found out that the base model 11" Zenbook does not have an SD card slot, while the Macbook Air does. >TB is only useful if you limit yourself to that port. Most people don't have a TB display, or any TB accessories, because (at least for now) it's mostly an Apple thing, and not very widely adopted. TB might become the USB of the future or it'll be yet another Apple specific niche product. You missed the point here. Both laptops have a video out, one being MicroHDMI and the other being Thunderbolt. Both of those require an adapter to be used with any monitor or TV, so that cancels each other out... However the MicroHDMI port is simply a video out port. The Thunderbolt port does things in addition to being a video out port. It doesn't matter if you personally intend to do something with it or not... we're just objectively comparing the prices of two products. I personally wouldn't use the SD card slot on the Macbook Air... but again, it doesn't matter. We're doing an objective comparison. >I got my prices from comparing the official Apple Store for Germany with the Amazon prize for the UX21A, since Asus doesn't have it's own store, afaik. Well... this being a month old copy/paste from another comment of mine (before the Zenbook came out) admittedly my prices weren't quite right. According to that verge link I already posted, the Zenbook is $1,049. The Macbook Air is $1,099 according to Apple's site, so we're at a 50 dollar difference. >If I add in the adapters, i get the prices i quoted, which are different. Apple overcharges for their adapters. Everyone know this. Hence why you go to monoprice.com and buy from there whatever you might need for literally a few dollars. >I disagree that they look identical. For example, all Macbooks are very uniform in color and form. This is most apparent when they're closed, when they form sort of a "unity". The Zenbook, on the other hand, has a circularly brushed and colored top and a hinge that stands out. It's edges are also a lot sharper and more distinct than the Airs. The interior also differs, especially in color. A lot of the parts that are white in the Air are black/dark in the Zenbook and vice-versa. Especially the bottom bezel of display is an obvious(and in my opinion, rahter ugly) difference. They're similar, yes, but not identical. With such tight constraints, it's no wonder that there are similarities. A wheel is always round, so if the only way to differ is the thread and rims, the differences will be confined to those places. Hence why I said almost identical. I should have just said similar. But I didn't mean they were completely identical.

Because, as much as I hate Lamar Smith, some people just don't care about the Internet. To get him unelected, you'll either need to get people there to care about a free and open Internet or get him to cause something bad that matters to the population in general. At the moment, most of his constituents see him as not doing anything wrong.

In debate the slippery slope argument isn't considered a logical fallacy, though it isn't always a solid argument. Wikipedia sums it up quite nicely: >The strength of such an argument depends on the warrant, i.e. whether or not one can demonstrate a process which leads to the significant effect. The fallacious sense of "slippery slope" is often used synonymously with continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. Modern usage avoids the fallacy by acknowledging the possibility of this middle ground.

The whole point of war is to provide expensive goods and services. Our existing toys will get cheaper to make, but they'll be replaced by something equally expensive. Nobody wants to spend less. Nobody questions spending during a war, so it's a great way to give money to friends in industry.

This just begs the question - Why is the guy who didn't break a law in his country being extradited to stand trial in a country where he would have broken the law? The whole scenario seems to me to provide a strong argument that the Extradition Law (agreement?) between the US and UK is completely irrational and unjust. Even if you apply the Extradition Law to terrorists (or would-be terrorists) it still doesn't make sense - if a foreign national is planning to terrorize a foreign nation from the comfort of a third nation, then it should be up to the counter-terrorism/law enforcement of the third party to act and prosecute according to the laws in that country. If the nation that is suspected of being terrorized by these foreign nationals obtains information or evidence pertaining to the crime that the third party was previously unaware of, then that information should be passed to said country for them to act according to their own laws. This should not be an opportunity for the terrorized (or in this case, "wronged") country to be "gifted" the criminals after their capture in order for them to seek their own justice... How is it that when the US wants criminals extradited to face trial (or previously to get locked up indefinitely and subject to "extreme interrogation" in Guantanamo) it's deemed ok? But when some Middle-Eastern or Asian country wants a criminal extradited (where they could face possible execution or torture) the UK seems to resist because they believe the suspect may face torture or execution...? Anyone care to enlighten me?

Blah blah blah blah blah quality quantity blah blah blah. Shut the fuck up for real. Even if the apps are absolutely garbage, there's still plenty of quality apps on both platforms. Yes, there are some fart apps and other stupid ones, but are you guys really telling me that (aside from spyware) more choice in apps is a bad thing?! Hell, even if there's an app that doesn't do anything at all really... maybe it's some 12 year old kid who's just learning to code and getting his first app out there. Maybe in ten years, that kid will create the next Instagram or Facebook or Evernote, inspired by his endeavors as a kid. Maybe, and I know this will blow a lot of your minds, there are people out there who actually like the "stupid" fart apps and other nonsense apps out there. No one is making you download them, you know, and since there's clearly a market for goofy, cheesy, "stupid" apps, then why shouldn't devs make them? In the end, I just see this as a triumph of the dev community of both Android and iOS and I'd like to congratulate them both on 700,000 apps. No matter how you look at it, those are some damned impressive numbers.

You raise a good point, and it's brought up in these discussions often, but then you drench it with a thick layer of "manchildren" and "neckbeards". Saying something and then insulting people for how you think they may respond is not a good way to have a discussion.

Over the last half century, by far the greatest technological advances have been in micro-electronics and even that is now slowing down. They're still getting smaller for the time being, but they haven't gotten any faster in the last decade after speeding up almost 100x in the prior decade. That notwithstanding the pace of change has decelerated vs the prior half century. What I find interesting is that things like self driving cars are part of what Ray Kurweil calls the singularity, where machine intelligence meets and quickly surpasses human intelligence. I'm betting we'll see this in the coming decades. The problem is that it could mean heaven or hell for most of us.

This article assumes that the position of the monitor on your desk is never going to change, which is silly. The current desktop set up is just what worked best for what people were doing, which was using the keyboard and mouse. Once touch becomes a primary form of interacting with the desktop you'll see the it change and the screen will probably be at an angle right in front of you where the keyboard is now, the same place humans have put whatever it is they were working on for the last 1000+ years while sitting at a desk. The keyboard could go under it or be split and put on the sides. The idea that people will get gorilla arm and never change their set up is just ridiculous. Touch on the desktop is new, give it more than 2 months for the hardware and furniture to catch up before you go claiming things will never change.

I felt the same way the first night. Then I forced myself to keep using it, because I had to forget some old Windows habits. The drag down from the top center to close is so natural, clicking the X in the corner seems stupid now. The one place to go for search and settings in each application is great, granted something Apple forced for a long time, but not as well. Task switching, switching between "desktop" apps and single purpose stuff like the music player is so easy. The mouse movements seem shorter, more efficient. For a right-hander, I've always hated OS X having everything on the left. And the menu bar at the top so I have to move 48" to the left to click file on a small window on my right monitor. That's just stupid. Apple's answer is "why would you want to do that", whereas Microsoft is "People might want to do this, so let's give them the option". I still have my iMac, and I have to say some things about OS X are still good. Fonts and icon rendering is great. The underlying Unix is great, but gets less great with each release, as Apple rewrites more old standby tools with worse versions of their own (Launchd, please). Anyway, I think the new windows is the best touch windowing system out there, and definitely the best for handling multiple large widescreen monitors. It's cheap, fast, and runs great on hardware that's under $500 now. Also, just got one of these [logitech touch pads]( and I have to say this is what really makes the interface work. You see, this entire article talks about gorilla arm, but touch doesn't have to be on the screen. I think the real vision is going to be many input; for instance, you'll have voice control, gestures, on-screen touch and off-screen touch, and then keyboards, mice and pen-tablets as needed. Each type of interface has its strong points. What M$FT has done is make the interface transparent by allowing you the option to use any or all of these at the same time. Whereas APPL is in the business of selling $80 keyboards and USB adapters that are keyed to only work with their products... I just don't see that being sustainable long term with new stuff coming out all the time that's cheaper, and not 10 to 20 year old ideas. I want to say, to end this rant, that I am NOT biased, not a MS fanboi. I have used everything from Commodore Amiga, Win3.1, Apple][ and MacOS1 all the way to the latest on either side, as well as other stuff like Xwindows, Linux desktops (KDE and Gnome), command line, text menus, weird experimental shit, and everything in between. As far as design, efficiency of use and the underlying development (and system) platform, Windows 8 is the best thing available right now. If only they'd put it on top of Unix instead of the damn NT kernel.

I totally agree, I have the UV-5R and that little guy is on just about as long as I'm awake. Since these little Baofeng radios work on only the 2 meter and 70 centimeter bands, they are pretty much local use only. That being said, as your results may vary, but in my location I hear lots of interesting talk during the day. Everything from solar power setups to U.F.O.s, as well as lots of discussions about the weather. I'm expecting a nice Yagi antenna in a few days which should allow me to make some long-distance contacts using ham radio satellites as they make a pass over my house, should be pretty cool. I'm having a lot of fun with this stuff and will definitely be getting on the HF frequencies before long--just as soon as my wallet can help me out!

Free service Service that doesn't use you or your details to make money You only get to pick one. Is anyone ever going to offer a free service and at the same time not try to make any money from that service? I know the internet seems really abstract, but in reality it is just a lot of servers that need to be built, maintained, powered, connected, and secured. Electricity doesn't grow on trees. Neither do hard drives. Neither do server farms and buildings. Nor do engineers who make and maintain those buildings vast infrastructure. Though your inbox is only 100 megabytes full, a million times 100 megabytes is a lot of computers hard drives someone is paying for. It seems silly since most of the internet is free to use, but in reality there is always someone footing your bill. Reddit costs money, we just get to use it for free. Gmail costs money, we just get to use it for free. Youtube costs money, we just get to use it for free. I see this all the time. People getting a free service online who don't even realise that they are actually getting a service. They just assume since they paid for the internet they use on their end, the money stops there. They don't wonder why they can connect to IT infrastructure they don't even understand. They don't wonder why they can upload videos for free with an unlimited bandwidth usage policy, but they will complain when they cant upload at the maximum speed their connection offers.

Cookies are disabled > > Your browser's cookies seem to be disabled. Ads Preferences will not work until you enable cookies in your browser. How do I enable cookies? Oh, right. I disable cookies and only permit them for specific sites I need to log into. And I disable javascript across Google's domains because it cuts out much of their web 2.0 bullshit and keeps it reasonably no frills as it should be (including the last two terrible updates to images.google). I often browse with a proxy, only ever access my Gmail over POP, and wouldn't be caught dead with a Google+ or even a Youtube account after they integrated it. And after reading they were paying up to $1 billion just to be the default iPhone search, I switched mine to Bing.

the patterns of consensus on emerging topics would not typically change all that much. We are social creatures after all, and if the majority of our peers are making an interpretation - one that is logical and aligns with our principals - we will tend to subscribe & support those interpretations as well.

Many police departments in the US can't (or won't) use these device tracking things as evidence. I work for a university. We had a state-owned laptop go missing. We pulled up the "find my mac" stuff and was able to collect: photos of the person using the stolen laptop name, phone number, and home address of the person using the stolen laptop movement tracking data (their friends houses, their work, their classes, where they drink, etc.) and when they go to those places. internet and application logs showing the thief researching how to wipe the laptop and disable the tracking software We were even able to show that the person in the photos we captured was also recorded on the building's security cameras. The person came in to the building at about 6pm empty-handed, and left 20 minutes later with looked like a manilla folder with a macbook pro in it (slightly sticking out on both ends). That person is not a student, staff, or faculty in the building where the equipment was taken. The laptop had been missing for approximately 4 days before anyone noticed. We were able to gather all the above information in a matter of minutes once the investigation started. We notified the police according to the State regulations. They asked if we had any information about the theft and we provided the police department with all the data we collected. Two days later after no action, we called to follow up and were transferred to a detective. That detective told us they could not do anything about the theft because all the data we collected cannot be admitted as evidence. Without the data we collected, there was nothing else to go on. The detective told us we, effectively, made it impossible for them to pursue and arrest the thief in any legal way. We aren't law enforcement, so all the data we collected could easily be dismissed as improperly collected, tampered, or obtained via illegal wiretapping. The detective told us that he even had to file some paperwork to protect US from possible legal backlash on behalf of the accused thief! We (my boss and I) waited until the thief went to class the next day. We were waiting with the lecturer as the student came in. He sat down, opened the laptop, and started surfing facebook. We asked him to show us the serial number of his computer and he refused and turned pale. We reminded him that according to the information systems usage agreements and other university policies he agreed to, he didn't have a choice. The serial number matched our purchase records and we took the laptop. Meanwhile, the lecturer called the police and they showed up. They were able to finally arrest the guy because he: was on state/university property, so there are no protections for illegal search and seizure was caught red-handed with equipment reported as stolen by the State (felony theft) had attempted to file off the serial number on the bottom of the laptop (felony destruction of state property) had some marijuana and adderall in his backpack (felony and misdemeanor possession of controlled substances) If we had not taken the initiative to track the guy down on our own, using the protection of the State building and the university usage agreement policies, we would have not been able to recover the stolen laptop even though we knew exactly who the person was and where they lived. Later, we found out that the theft charges were later dropped in a plea bargain. The campus PD decided to pursue the drug possession charges instead. Apparently, having a couple grams of bud and an adderall pill around finals time is more important to the campus police department than felony theft and destruction of university property, acquired with public funds.

No joke, this actually happened to me recently! I accidentally left my phone somewhere and someone picked it up. I didn't realise until maybe 20mins later when I was home. My housemate tracked it and we were shocked to see it outside a store we hasn't visited! My quick thinking housemate jumped in the car, and we took off chasing this person! As we got closer they were getting further away, but my housemate smashed it! We were doing 100km/h in 60km/h zones on windy dirt roads!!!! Needless to say, after a massive U turn and spinning gravel, we shot up this driveway as the guy was getting out of his car with his beer. Happy to say, I got my phone back! :)

The Paid subscription service is for TV shows not for any and every YouTube channel out there E.G. I like show a but dont have the channel it is on channel a but that is ok because i can pay X amount to watch all past episodes of show a and all future ones as long as i pay. the current subscriptions you have will be the same (unless they are show makers and would opt in for paid subing) will be exactly the same. One thing i would like youtube to do for non episodic channels is have a free sub (with adverts) and a paid sub (without adverts) which the revenue from it goes to the producer even if they do not make shows Edit:

Yes they google have been talking about going into a TV live subscription plan for a while. This is not for current users videos, what it is for is TV( or online video series) shows so you will not be paying to sub to RWJ or who ever you would be paying for sub to "the walking dead" or "AMC" and get their videos online when they come out (names i have used are just for examples) by having the paid for service some tv producers may end up having advert paid for subscription on older shows (normal channel) so it should end up being a win win for everyone, more content online, cheaper and on demand for the users. Content control, direct revenue, large audience for the producer. more content, and revenue for YouTube(google)

The US puts a lot of weight on consumer rights. It's all about creating a competitive market that benefits the consumer. If companies are colluding and raising prices arbitrarily, it hurts the consumer. There's also no way possible that all the companies would decide to raise prices on their own without colluding. The whole concept of a competitive market is that all the companies want to offer better products and/or lower prices than their competition.

Hi, all. Long time lurker, first time poster. I am an antitrust lawyer (among other things) and have followed this case closely, because it is interesting. Lots of the information in this thread is not accurate, probably because the coverage of this case fails in large part to capture its nuances. I am accordingly going to try to explain what is up. Allow me to set the stage. Back in 2009, eBooks were sold using the traditional retail model, i.e. publishers sold them to resellers (like Amazon) and the resellers sold them at whatever price they chose. Amazon chose to sell them cheaply (at $9.99), even sometimes below cost, because they wanted everyone to buy Kindles and they thought cheap eBooks were the best way to make that happen. Even though the price at which Amazon sold eBooks to consumers did not directly affect the price the publishers received for those eBooks, the publishers still hated the cheap price, primarily because it threatened the paper book industry, i.e. if eBooks were cheap, people would more readily switch to that format instead of buying paper books (I believe publishers made more money off paper books). Around this time, Apple was looking to introduce this neat new product called an “iPad” which, among other things, could serve as an eBook reader. The then-living Steve Jobs also hated what Amazon was doing, because it led to a perception that $9.99 was the proper price for an eBook and this limited the price at which Apple could sell eBooks through the iBookstore, meaning Apple made less money. As such, both Apple and the publishers had tremendous incentive to prevent Amazon from selling discounted eBooks. So, what were the poor beleaguered publishers to do? Well, there was this other way of selling eBooks, called the “Agency Model.” As opposed to the traditional method of reselling eBooks described above (publisher sells to reseller, reseller sells to consumer at price it chooses), when a reseller sells an eBook pursuant to the Agency Model, the publisher from which the eBook originated controls the price at which the eBook is sold to the consumer. In other words, the contracts between the publishers and Amazon (for example) would require Amazon to sell that eBook at a price dictated by the publisher, thereby preventing Amazon (or anyone) from discounting eBooks. There is a problem, though: if only one publisher begins selling books pursuant to the Agency Model, all that happens is that that publisher’s eBooks get more expensive and price-sensitive consumers switch to cheaper eBooks from other publishers. So the agency strategy only works if all publishers implement the strategy at the same time. It is the classic collective action problem: the benefits exist only if all parties move together, while the burdens fall on any party moving independently. SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET ILLEGAL. Two things then (allegedly!) happen, one involving Apple and one not. The latter first: the publishers begin discussing among themselves agreeing to implement the Agency Model simultaneously, thereby making sure prices rise across the board. But they could not really make it happen until the second thing happened. The second thing: Enter Jobs and the iPad. Jobs and Apple wished to switch the entire publishing industry to the Agency Model and, accordingly (also allegedly!) served as a go-between through which the publishers agreed to simultaneously switch to the Agency Model. In other words, Jobs went to publisher #1 and said “will you implement the Agency Model if publishers ##2,3,4, and 5 do?” Publisher #1 says “yes!” Jobs then goes to publisher 2 and says “Publisher #1 has agreed to switch to the Agency Model if you do. That cool?” Publisher #2 says “yes!” And so on. Pretty soon, Jobs has orchestrated an industry-wide agreement to impose the Agency Model. The implementation of the Agency Model occurs essentially simultaneously with the introduction of the iPad. Amazon kicks and screams and fights, but succumbs to the model after some publishers just stop doing business with it until it agrees to do so. Now, the publishers have the ability to dictate the price at which Amazon and other resellers sell eBooks to consumers. They exercise that right to impose an across-the-board price increase on eBooks sold through all outlets. As a practical matter, this means the price for eBooks published by major publishers immediately jumps from $9.99 to $12.99 (in most instances). Brief digression into antitrust law: What is critical to the wrongdoing here is the fact that there were agreements between the publishers pertaining to price. Because the publishers are competitors, the agreement was horizontal, meaning they occupy the same place in the distribution chain and sell to the same people. Horizontal agreements pertaining to price are the “supreme evil” condemned by the antitrust laws, and are the very most illegal thing competitors can do. This is because there is no possible competitive justification for a price-fixing agreement. What this means is that if Justice and the private plaintiffs can demonstrate the publishers agreed to put this agreement in place, the case is over and the publishers lose. So, the publishers, when caught, are up shit creek, and they all settle. So, what about Apple? Because Apple does not compete with the publishers, its liability is premised on the fact that it orchestrated the agreements between the publishers. In other words, it is not really liable for any agreements it, itself, made. Rather, its liability (if proven) stems from the fact that it worked behind the scenes to make the horizontal agreements happen. It is a so-called “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy. Think of a wagon wheel. Apple is the hub. The publishers are the spokes. And the rim of the wheel is the illegal agreement. While Apple is not directly in competition with any of the publishers, by inserting itself as the hub through which the illegal conduct was facilitated, it incurred liability. I have not seen their pretrial statement, but I would guess their defense is that there may very well have been an illegal agreement between the publishers, but they did not make it happen. That is the long and short of it. Couple of folks on here made reference to most favored nations clauses. This case really is not about those – they existed in the agreements, sure, and they were bad (and likely an enforcement mechanism), but the wrongdoing was the agreement on price. Couple folks also made reference to monopolization. Also not an issue here. Apple is not, and never was, a monopolist in the eBooks market. The case is about horizontal agreement, i.e. good old cartelization & price-fixing. It is interesting stuff, at least to me. I hope this explanation is helpful to some of you. Now I will go back to editing my brief.

So you think Apple is innocent and you frequent r/apple and you regularly deny them doing anything wrong on every issue in your comment history.