It was definitely a thing, in the sense that the technology existed in the U.S. It just never took off.

I used to work for a company that built a Ringback Tone platform for carriers. I thought it was pretty nifty that you could change the ringback tone heard by people calling you, even if I never used the service myself. Thought it was usually used to play popular music, there are probably ways that businesses could have used it for marketing / etc.

Alas, it was not a huge seller for us.

Commodore didn't use the index hole or hard sectors.

Commodore's disk format had a variable number of sectors per track. They took advantage of the fact that the outer tracks on the disk are physically longer, and can therefore fit more sectors at the same bit density. Hard sectoring would have been impossible.

In the mean time, you end up with a president who goes completely against the progressive cause you are trying to advance.

In four years, your progressive causes (health care, environmental protection, income inequality, marriage equality, etc) get set back by a decade.

But all that will be worth it as long as you send a message?

This isn't about restoring a JPEG file back into its original RAW format. The information lost from converting RAW to JPEG is gone. There is no way to get that back.

This is about storing JPEG files more efficiently. DropBox is in the business of providing cloud storage, and it is in their best interest to keep their costs as low as possible. The more they can compress data for their customers, the more efficiently they use their infrastructure. Some files such as text documents are easy to compress. Some files such as JPEG files are difficult to compress, especially with lossless algorithms.

For DropBox, this allows them to store the LEP representation of a JPEG file instead of the actual JPEG file. This saves them approximately 22% of their storage needs. They can then decompress it on the fly whenever a user tries to read the original JPEG file, essentially trading savings in storage costs for a bit of extra CPU demand. As long as the compression is lossless and the user sees acceptable performance, there is no user impact.

Depending on the cost of extra CPU cycles vs. the cost of reduced storage, and the relative mix of JPEG files vs. other data files, this could save DropBox quite a bit of money.

My city of 150K has a dozen sales tax districts and four zip codes. Now multiply that by every city and town in the US. Think it is going to be that easy to figure out?

The states with more burdensome tax code do have a problem with getting retailers to open up new stores.

Look fucktard, the planet is slowing dieing, and people like you are hurrying about the process. We have rice crops failing in Asia, fish stocks are dwindling, coral is bleaching out, and in general the oceans are becoming polluted acid mess. This is no exaggeration.

It was pain to pull my iPhone3 out of my pocket, size has nothing to do with it. Now that I am entering my 40's and on the verge of needing bifocals, a larger screen is almost a necessity. Being able to glance at my wrist when a notification comes in is nice.

Frosted glass windows in the office barely let me know if it is sunny out. Today it is 47 degrees, last week it was 70. Knowing if I need to grab a jacket when I head out to lunch is nice.

how can you make meaningful changes if you do not measure what you are changing? Fitbits and the like are great at measuring exercise, then one can have a useful set of data when one makes changes to their habits. For me doing little things like parking further away and using the Bathroom on the far side of the building instead of the one that is 20 feet away has made a difference.

It is also nice to get notifications on my wrist instead of being that annoying guy whose phone chimes all the time.

Most debit cards are backed by Visa/Mastercard, so you still have the protections. Go with a good bank, or more likely credit union, and get the same redeemable points.

Unless it is government, then they charge the individual the fee.

Yes, they do.

I bought a used XBox 360 that unbeknownst to me had been repaired by the previous owner (they did some kind of RROD fix involving washers instead of the X-Brace that holds the heat sink in).

After a few months, it eventually developed the RROD, so I sent it to Microsoft for repair. Prior to sending it to Microsoft, I could play a game for a couple of minutes before the console died and gave me the RRoD.

After they received it, they quickly flagged my work order as an exception for hardware tampering. I was surprised to learn of this, since the seal was intact. Microsoft then sent it back to me, except that now it wasn't even bootable. When I turned it on, the lights would alternate between red and green (half red, half green). The screen showed an E49 error. Basically, it was bricked for being modified.

I don't know what happened while Microsoft had it, but I'm figuring it was one of the following.
* The only tampering done to my box was the RRoD repair. Nevertheless, Microsoft plays it safe by nuking any boxes where they detect tampering, as it's possible the DRM has been defeated using an undiscovered new method. Maybe their policy is to nuke boxes whenever they detect tampering?
* Possibly my XBox actually had been modded to play pirated games. Somehow it survived several console updates without a console ban, but maybe that was coming eventually. Microsoft nuked it.

In any case, when I explained the situation to them, that I had sent a semi-working XBox 360 to them and got a dead one back, they politely told me to pound sand.

This would be much simpler than using a GeoIP database and trying to play whack-a-mole with VPN providers. I'd be surprised if Netflix hasn't already considered this and decided against it. Usually if a company is not using a technically obvious and simple solution, it is because there is a business reason in the way.

It's possible that content providers want the content controlled by viewing location, rather than the subscriber's billing address. Today, if you are a US subscriber and you visit Canada, Netflix will only show you its Canadian content while you're traveling. Similarly, if your DSL modem's IP address changes and the new one is incorrectly listed as being in the UK, you will see content from the UK instead of the US (ask me how I know this! :) )

If your account were tied to your billing address, it would be very easy to swap your login with friends in other countries to get around the content locks. To prevent this, Netflix would have to make your account work only in your home country, making it impossible to travel with Netflix. That becomes a customer satisfaction issue.

In any case, I don't think Netflix believes there's a foolproof way to prevent content from being viewed outside of its authorized regions, because anybody who understands the problem knows it's impossible to be perfect. However, it's reasonable to make a good faith effort to try, as this is probably required by their licensing agreements. I think that's what Netflix is trying to do here.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/th...

Some dogs never get over the death of a beloved owner.

Actually reports I have read, say they believe one of the shooters is an employee who had left earlier in the day due to an argument. that surely sounds like a disgruntled employee to me.