Same in the UK (although IIRC, on regulations mandated by the EU). T-Mobile hit me with a £15 fee to unlock my phone, which was already out-of-contract.

You don't have the faintest fucking clue what you're talking about. A digital camera doesn't magically process your photos for you - you still have to go through every shot, make your selections & then go about developing your RAWs into something presentable. You still have to go & scope your locations & plan your shots. You still have to spend time getting to know your clients, so you can capture the style & feeling that they're looking for. You still have to spend a shit-ton on equipment, redundant equipment, insurance, assistants, etc. etc.

The only difference technology has made is the ability to review your shots in the moment & allow more shots to be taken.
Yes, that helps a lot, but it also means that we're now able to push photography far further than was even possible before. It means that you'll be able to get far more for your money than you would have done in the days of film.

Copyright also works exactly the way it always used to, you're just confusing the two methods a photographer uses to bill for their work: per print, or per hour/day/etc.

I used to perform in a lot of sports competitions & if you wanted to purchase a photo, the price would depend on what size print you wanted. If you wanted to buy the photo & copyright outright, it would be a different price than simply buying a 4x3. Photographers aren't contracted for these events, they earn their money by selling prints.
If you contract a photographer & pay them for their time, then (unless you agree otherwise) you will retain the rights over the material they create during that period.
To draw an analogy with the IT world, it's like buying a single-site licence for a web template & then demanding that you get sole use. No, if you want to buy it outright, you pay for it.

You do get some cowboys who try to milk their fees by selling overpriced CDs, etc. But that's because they're cowboys trying win contracts by undercharging & then heaping on a bunch of other hidden costs. That's not the photographer's fault, that because there are people out there who expect the moon on a stick for $300. Fuck that!

A good professional photographer is definitely worth it, especially for once-in-a-lifetime events such as weddings. The problem is digital photography made the barrier to entry much lower & the market is now flooded with point-&-shoot cowboys who don't know their bokeh from their flare.
Photography is an expensive & time consuming profession & it takes a lot of experience to know how to work an event & your subjects well. Taking pictures is about a 10th of the total work involved.

In the UK, if you're paying under £1.5k per day, then your "photographer" probably spends most of his other days driving a taxi.

There's a lot of double-think in the world, and those in the medical profession are no exception. I could be a bit more empathetic with nurses though - they work in care rather than diagnosis & treatment. I've met a few nurses who are highly trained on paper, but have little idea of *how* the treatments they're applying actually work - that's the Doctor's job.

Healthcare workers are required to be vaccinated because they work with people who are highly vulnerable both to giving & receiving diseases. It's not just vaccines, even health workers who catch the common cold will be required to take time off, as it could be deadly to their patients with poor immune systems.

This is just current enterprise tech finally making its way into the consumer world.
I've done a lot of work developing technology for language schools, requiring the recognition & reproduction of speech. This is nothing new, it's just speech recognition algorithms being parsed through a translator & then spat back out by a text-to-speech engine. Heck, I even have something like this running on my home Media Centre.

The groundwork has been done by universities & is being improved by both public (the CIA comes to mind) & private sectors. Unsurprisingly, it's big business in the teleconferencing market.

It's not perfect, however it's very different to the challenges presented to the likes of YouTube. A telephone conversation doesn't have problems with background noise & the people using this technology are aware they need to speak more slowly & clearly - a benefit not afforded to movies & cat videos.

The Japanese telecoms company NTT Docomo has been offering this technology to its customers since 2012!
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

They're just the static tiles you get on a normal new tab page, except they're populated with sponsored sites until your browser history automatically replaces them. This isn't something that would even affect updating users, just fresh installs with an empty history.

I've had issues with this, although mostly with people not groking that British English is a valid form of the language. It wasn't even an American journal, it was French!

"We're all equal, but some of us are more equal than others."

Whoops. Mis-mod. Why aren't we able to edit our mods? *grumble*

Um, you mean like some sort of Link Aggregation Control Protocol? Sounds like a good idea!

Oh, look!

Load balancing & bonding over multiple NICs. Isn't this what LACP was made for?
No idea if there's anything available for Windows, but chuck a Linux VM on it to act as a virtual router & presto!

How well it works would depend on the LACP stack's ability to handle the issues presented by wireless modems. It works great in a server environment.

Playlists don't, and never have, copied files or required sole access to them. All of the common playlist formats are basically just text files with a list of filenames - you can open & edit them in Notepad!

Colonialism heavily relied on slavery &/or being bank-rolled by the home land.
The pittance received by the these disenfranchised communities, many of whom not lucky enough to have been able to dedicate their youth to our high quality education (much of which is funded by the government, you filthy scrounger), is hardly a comparable situation.

How has this post been modded +4 Insightful?!
Kindly go fuck yourself, you racist xenophobe.

As per that same section in the document...