Would it? Reminds me of the finding that hybrid cars didn't cut down on fossil fuel consumption as much as many people thought because since they were more efficient, people drove them more. I don't doubt that the computers themselves would use less energy, but I suspect people might then use some of the money that they save from their laptop and use it to keep the house cooler/warmer or whatever.
Not that that would be a bad thing of course, but since people already tend to moderate their electricity usage to what they can (or want) to afford, lowering use in one area must simply see it transfered to another - rather than reducing overall consumption.
>>Why is "Getting out of jury duty" considered smart?
The old Tragedy of the Commons. While our behavior in aggregate may lead us to ruin, as individuals we still find it better to dodge jury duty because we accrue all the benefit, and (generally) so little of the detriment.
I understand your sentiment, but frankly, I'd prefer if the police didn't try to use psychoanalysis to detect bombs.
"Well she's wearing it on her sweatshirt, which is in plain sight, so it can't be a bomb."
You're right that there are clearly plenty of threats that fall into the more concealed category, but that doesn't police should ignore obvious threats because they have some gold standard perception about how people think. As someone else here said, sometimes crazy people do crazy things, like wear bombs in plain sight.
>>You can't be serious? You're either too young or too dumb to understand the concept of a slippery slope.
Not everything is a slippery slope. The parent is probably right that not being able to make untapped calls to Afghanistan is a reasonable trade for the added security. What makes the wiretapping program unacceptable is that it has no real oversight and therefore no brakes, i.e. your slippery slope. But I don't think that some surveillance with proper oversight is a problem. It's the "TRUST US" attitude that needs to go.
Probably their customers. I know I would be pretty pissed off if suddenly the place I bought my groceries, or software, suddenly had to shut down because some asshole at the flunky level in the company did something illegal.
Isn't it more like you left those CDs next to a computer with a burner and left a sign saying something to the effect of "anyone who wants to copy these CDs, feel free, just bring your own blanks"?
The whole damn point of this debate is what the intent of the person with the share folder was. You can't give an analogy that essentially strips out all the intent of the student to let the files be copied freely, and then use that to prove that the intent didn't exist in the original situation. He didn't just "leave his window rolled down." He intentionally adhered to a setup that has no other real world function other than copyright infringement.
That setup should carry weight. Ever go tricker treating when you were a kid and someone left a bowl of candy out on their front step? I don't think they could take you to court if, after you took a piece, they jumped out from behind a set of bushes and claimed theft. The implication of what a bowl of candy on Halloween is intended for is too strong for them to claim reasonably that it was intended for something else, and that you should have known that.
So to the student, he can claim all he wants, but if his main point is "well, I never intended for it to be used THAT way!" then I don't think he's going to win. It's just too unreasonable to believe that he never intended for copyright infringement to occur, and then when it did, none of it is his fault. And say what you want about the RIAA, but the law then makes his actions illegal.
Whoever modded me offtopic is a retard. The post I replied to was on the subject of libertarianism, was it not? Surely I didn't overstep the bounds of the discussion... but thanks anyway whoever thought they were making slashdot a better place by doing that.
Right but when these two are inextricably intertwined... it's the same reason we don't allow people to drive drunk. Some behaviors or actions aren't technically harmful in and of themselves, but they lead to harm with such a great degree of frequency that out of sheer pragmatism we ban them anyway. I think some of the illegals clearly fall into this category.
You know on libertarianism, and I was thinking about this because I consider voting for Ron Paul, you know what holds them back? Complete lack of foreign policy. I don't want to waste too much time on this, because it's off topic, but that's I think what stops libertarian candidates from being legitimate candidates (particularly in the case of the presidency). What's Doc Paul's answer for Iran? N.K.? Is it non-interventionism? Because I think we can do better than that.
Anyway, if you feel like that sort of rings true to you, and want to read the same opinion by someone with a name, feel free to go to reason.com (which is the site of the libertarian magazine Reason) and read the recent interview with Christopher Hitchens, who happens to say much the same thing.
Except... selling albums. Or are you implying that people will stop listening to music? Destroying markets that aren't profitable for you or that you don't control is evil, and our freaking congress of all groups shouldn't be the ones giving these guys cart blanche to do so, but it isn't exactly bad business.
You know, I wrote out a whole long essay type response, but at the end I realized I can summarize it pretty effectively so I decided to do that instead. All this pro-drug crap (no offense) seems to ignore a huge glaring issue, and that issue is that most people are simply not of the quality it would take to live in an environment with fully legalized drugs along the lines of coke, meth, etc.
The problem is that with heroin at your local CVS, you're going to have a hard time convincing people that drug use is morally wrong, and you can't scare them anymore with jail time, etc. You, honestly, are crazy if you think that most people don't use drugs because of a levelheaded decision involving the relevant health related pros and cons that tells them it's a bad idea. Like I said, that way overestimates the quality of the average person. I don't care that you can make that call, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that most people can't, and won't.
So now we DO have a lot more people using drugs (maybe not older people, but certainly teenagers, etc), and what now? Do you have any personal experience with people that use drugs heavily, or am I responding to an armchair opinion? If it's the former you know that it tends not to work out well. Maybe some of that can be alleviated with therapy or community support or something, but I don't really see how. Take a hypothetical example where a teenager gets addicted to heroin, and you're trying to get them to stop because all they want to do is sit in a room with their smack. What do you do? You made the damn laws with the intent that it would be their personal choice, so the answer is nothing.
The crux of the matter rests on whether you think more or less people would use drugs in a legalized environment, and then whether you think that the usage itself is a significant detriment to the average person. I hope I've show why you to the former you should be skeptical that more people wouldn't use. We know people make bad decisions when it comes to short term pleasures that have long term detriments (smoking, getting fat, GAMBLING, etc). I can imagine the average 20 year old being able to make a responsible decision about drug use if the pros and cons were explained to them, but then if I go out and TALK to the average 20 year old, I quickly realize I'm kidding myself. To the latter, I think any experience with drugs or those who use them will tell you that the usage is bad. Yes, some of that comes from complications that arise out of shortages, but I can tell you that when someone who likes heroin has as much heroin as they want, that's what they do. Heroin. They don't have to steal from their parents or anything, but that doesn't mean we should be throwing a party or anything. And people on meth are just plain bad period, irrespective of whether they have enough or not. People using pot, on the other hand, are pretty much fine.
And that leads me to my final point, which would be forget about full legalization, because in a real world context it would lead to shit, and support something better, like the legalization of certain drugs that have a lot fewer cons attached, and in which the ultimate detriment to the average person (and therefore society) is a lot more reasonable, if it exists at all. I.e. support marijuana and forget about most of the others.
But all the "artists have gigs" line really means is that there is a revenue stream that doesn't include selling pirateable material (well... you could cam a concert and then show that to people, but that's hardly the same thing). Anyhow, to the sound engineers etc, that revenue stream would (if the idea works) then go to pay for them. Just because there wouldn't be any money from selling CD's that could be used to pay them, doesn't mean they wouldn't get payed.
None of that is of course to say I have any idea whether a music industry could be supported nearly entirely through live showings, but it is to say that if it was tried it wouldn't imply that anyone not actually up on stage was automatically getting screwed. The money source just shifts.
that any discussion of semantics like this is really pointless if you're not going back to the original text. There are actually a number of versions of the creation myth, dating to various times and places. I know that in one (that I believe dates farther back than the one we currently "use") man was created first, and then animals to entertain him, not him last like in the bibles you read today. Anyhow, my point is that for all I know if you go back to the original Hebrew or Aramaic the tree isn't even called the tree of "Knowledge of Good and Evil," and maybe god didn't say it would kill them, he said it would "destroy them" which you could argue it did, in which case he wasn't lying, but the definition of whatever word kill or destroy is actually coming from is what you need (with the appropriate knowledge of the relevant language) to really make a case either way.
So I guess what I'm saying is that most English translations today are trash anyway, because they've been bastardized over and over by people writing what they want something to mean, or mistakenly think it means, or prefer it to mean so it's easier to digest, or doesn't upset anyone, etc etc, so I wouldn't come to any conclusions on what god supposedly did or did not do off of one.
was the incredible number of stories that became tagged with "haha." Maybe I'm not in the majority with this opinion, but it came off as childish, and it annoyed me that any time a story about something marginally bad happening to any of the slashdot appointed evils ran, I could always count on it being tagged "haha." It just put images in my mind of a bunch of 12 years going "LOL FAGS," and I hated that, of course, because to some degree I come here for the maturity of the discussion. Maybe I totally misinterpreted the sense of that haha, but either way, that is one tag I'm not sad to see go.
Our economy is a capitalist economy. It is built on greed. And yes, it is absolutely the job of the the Monsanto leadership to pursue profit. If individuals in the corporation don't, they get replaced, and it's as simple as that. So if you would rather not think about it in terms of morality (which is probably a good idea anyway), think about it in terms of pragmatism. Corporations act selfishly. In fact, our economy depends on that. But it also depends on lawmakers to create an environment in which that selfish impulse works to the betterment of society. That's the invisible hand, and when that isn't working, it is absolutely the fault of lawmakers, and not the fault of individually greedy corporations. Because after all, that's how we expect them to behave.
How about if your goal is simply to tax the wealthy you simply tax them without getting internet commerce involved?. The argument against an internet tax is that internet commerce doesn't really require any of the services that taxes pay for in the same way that a brick and mortar store does (i.e. emergency services, etc). Please don't weigh that against some sense that people ordering online are wealthier and therefore need to be taxed when they do so. If you want the rich to pay more in taxes, change what their income bracket pays in income taxes or something like that, but please lets not harm internet commerce instead.
I mean hell, there are plenty of things that are predominantly in the realm of the "wealthy" rather than the poor; golf, restaurants, COMPUTERS, lets tax all of those too. Or not.
This actually has been shown not be true. To the extent that lower taxes boost the economy, and a larger economy generates more revenue in taxes, lower taxes have been shown in a fair a mount of cases to actually _increase_ the amount of money at the government's disposal, but in any case they very rarely reduce total revenue in the way you are thinking, except of course in the short term.
I'm not going to link to anything (although I believe the Economist ran an article a month or so back to the effect of what I'm saying if you care to hunt for it) but I wanted you to know that in practice things don't work that way; i.e. you really need to eliminate certain taxes to cut down on the amount of money the gov has - taking 10 percent off the top will only come back to bite you (I use that loosely) if dropping tax revenue is your goal.
>>That is an illustration of how nasty and flawed the entire system of copyright is.
Why can't we think in terms other than black and white when it comes to copyright here? That's really an example of how the _entire system_ is flawed? Or maybe just that part. An overly broad and abusive definition of derivative works being used to the detriment of society is not an indictment of copyright as a whole, and you shouldn't try to make it one. It's an indictment of overly broad and abusive definitions of derivative works. Let's leave it at that, so as to leave open the debate on copyright to more shades of grey, expecting the best answer to IP to land somewhere between everything and nothing, as answers tend to be in these cases.
The price of a cpu at a given subjective quality level hasn't changed much, i.e. top of the line cpus tend to cost about what they did a few years ago, but if you think I can't get a 1.8ghz p4 for far far less than when it came out, or that the newer chips won't be significantly cheaper in a few years, I'm fairly sure you're way off the mark.
I've been up all night, so maybe that's totally wrong, but I'm pretty sure not. The price of computing has come _way_ down over they years. The price of converting solar energy to electricity has not, and that is the orginal poster's complaint.
>>The reason these people are laid off is because the companies want even more profits, not because they are losing money during "bad times."
I'm not sure if this was written with what most slashdotters seem to have in mind when it is, but why is this implied to be bad behavior? Corporations are not branches of the government's welfare division. So if you want to write that using layoffs during good years to boost stock value and hence the value of executive stock options is bad, and complain about that, fine. But this idea that somehow unprofitable (or even less profitable) divisions in a large company shouldn't be eliminated or trimmed, or that waste is a good thing because it keeps people employed, doesn't make sense. Just like the music industry does not have a right to make money for x + y years simply because they made money for x years, employees don't have a right to continue to be employed simply because they have been in the past. My condolences go out to those who lost their jobs, and I know it's unpleasant, but we DO live in a capitalist society, and that's the way things work - distinctly for the better I might add. You happen to work in an inefficient or unprofitable section of a company, sometimes you get let go. That isn't some viciously evil idea by executives, its just economics.
My condolences again do go out to those fired, but really.
This is an overly simplistic view. The people that orchestrated the war in Iraq were not doing it out of any fear of job security. Obviously neither the position of Secretary of Defense, Vice president, or Deputy Secretary of Defense are going to go away if we aren't locked in a state of ever present war. It may be true that corporations in the defense and arms business have a vested interest in fomenting world conflict, but to imply that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al led us to war out of some perceived fear that they would become useless organs of government is ludicrous.
They went to war because they thought they could win easily, and it would be a good idea. They were wrong, on a number of levels, but that doesn't mean they're happy about or moreover intended the current situation over there, and to imply anything else, like I said, is pretty ridiculous.
this emerged at least partially out of their previous efforts with "media pcs." On of the obvious (but largely unspoken) problem they ran into there is that the PC with mouse and keyboard is just a shitty way to interact with media. Touchscreens, on the other hand, obviously aren't. So I think that despite the fact that they are initially of course selling this only to businesses, that will be the ultimate placement of this technology. It finally allows people to look at video, music, photos, etc, on a living room computer in a way that doesn't clash immensely with the intended atmosphere of the room. So bravo to Microsoft for making an appealing product, it'll be interesting to see what Apple's response is if this table ultimately becomes successful, as media is one of Apple's important domains. But either way, it's one of the few times MS may not be lying when they say a new paradigm is arriving. Should be fun to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
although I would point out its not like that means they don't come out ahead - at least they get to enjoy longer showers.
But yes I think it's actually a fairly common phenomenon
Would it? Reminds me of the finding that hybrid cars didn't cut down on fossil fuel consumption as much as many people thought because since they were more efficient, people drove them more. I don't doubt that the computers themselves would use less energy, but I suspect people might then use some of the money that they save from their laptop and use it to keep the house cooler/warmer or whatever.
Not that that would be a bad thing of course, but since people already tend to moderate their electricity usage to what they can (or want) to afford, lowering use in one area must simply see it transfered to another - rather than reducing overall consumption.
Cheers.
>>Why is "Getting out of jury duty" considered smart?
The old Tragedy of the Commons. While our behavior in aggregate may lead us to ruin, as individuals we still find it better to dodge jury duty because we accrue all the benefit, and (generally) so little of the detriment.
Here's a wikipedia link for those that want it: Tragedy of the Commons
I understand your sentiment, but frankly, I'd prefer if the police didn't try to use psychoanalysis to detect bombs.
"Well she's wearing it on her sweatshirt, which is in plain sight, so it can't be a bomb."
You're right that there are clearly plenty of threats that fall into the more concealed category, but that doesn't police should ignore obvious threats because they have some gold standard perception about how people think. As someone else here said, sometimes crazy people do crazy things, like wear bombs in plain sight.
>>You can't be serious? You're either too young or too dumb to understand the concept of a slippery slope.
Not everything is a slippery slope. The parent is probably right that not being able to make untapped calls to Afghanistan is a reasonable trade for the added security. What makes the wiretapping program unacceptable is that it has no real oversight and therefore no brakes, i.e. your slippery slope. But I don't think that some surveillance with proper oversight is a problem. It's the "TRUST US" attitude that needs to go.
Probably their customers. I know I would be pretty pissed off if suddenly the place I bought my groceries, or software, suddenly had to shut down because some asshole at the flunky level in the company did something illegal.
Isn't it more like you left those CDs next to a computer with a burner and left a sign saying something to the effect of "anyone who wants to copy these CDs, feel free, just bring your own blanks"?
The whole damn point of this debate is what the intent of the person with the share folder was. You can't give an analogy that essentially strips out all the intent of the student to let the files be copied freely, and then use that to prove that the intent didn't exist in the original situation. He didn't just "leave his window rolled down." He intentionally adhered to a setup that has no other real world function other than copyright infringement.
That setup should carry weight. Ever go tricker treating when you were a kid and someone left a bowl of candy out on their front step? I don't think they could take you to court if, after you took a piece, they jumped out from behind a set of bushes and claimed theft. The implication of what a bowl of candy on Halloween is intended for is too strong for them to claim reasonably that it was intended for something else, and that you should have known that.
So to the student, he can claim all he wants, but if his main point is "well, I never intended for it to be used THAT way!" then I don't think he's going to win. It's just too unreasonable to believe that he never intended for copyright infringement to occur, and then when it did, none of it is his fault. And say what you want about the RIAA, but the law then makes his actions illegal.
Whoever modded me offtopic is a retard. The post I replied to was on the subject of libertarianism, was it not? Surely I didn't overstep the bounds of the discussion... but thanks anyway whoever thought they were making slashdot a better place by doing that.
>>it's the actions...etc etc
Right but when these two are inextricably intertwined... it's the same reason we don't allow people to drive drunk. Some behaviors or actions aren't technically harmful in and of themselves, but they lead to harm with such a great degree of frequency that out of sheer pragmatism we ban them anyway. I think some of the illegals clearly fall into this category.
You know on libertarianism, and I was thinking about this because I consider voting for Ron Paul, you know what holds them back? Complete lack of foreign policy. I don't want to waste too much time on this, because it's off topic, but that's I think what stops libertarian candidates from being legitimate candidates (particularly in the case of the presidency). What's Doc Paul's answer for Iran? N.K.? Is it non-interventionism? Because I think we can do better than that.
Anyway, if you feel like that sort of rings true to you, and want to read the same opinion by someone with a name, feel free to go to reason.com (which is the site of the libertarian magazine Reason) and read the recent interview with Christopher Hitchens, who happens to say much the same thing.
Cheers.
Except... selling albums. Or are you implying that people will stop listening to music? Destroying markets that aren't profitable for you or that you don't control is evil, and our freaking congress of all groups shouldn't be the ones giving these guys cart blanche to do so, but it isn't exactly bad business.
You know, I wrote out a whole long essay type response, but at the end I realized I can summarize it pretty effectively so I decided to do that instead. All this pro-drug crap (no offense) seems to ignore a huge glaring issue, and that issue is that most people are simply not of the quality it would take to live in an environment with fully legalized drugs along the lines of coke, meth, etc.
The problem is that with heroin at your local CVS, you're going to have a hard time convincing people that drug use is morally wrong, and you can't scare them anymore with jail time, etc. You, honestly, are crazy if you think that most people don't use drugs because of a levelheaded decision involving the relevant health related pros and cons that tells them it's a bad idea. Like I said, that way overestimates the quality of the average person. I don't care that you can make that call, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that most people can't, and won't.
So now we DO have a lot more people using drugs (maybe not older people, but certainly teenagers, etc), and what now? Do you have any personal experience with people that use drugs heavily, or am I responding to an armchair opinion? If it's the former you know that it tends not to work out well. Maybe some of that can be alleviated with therapy or community support or something, but I don't really see how. Take a hypothetical example where a teenager gets addicted to heroin, and you're trying to get them to stop because all they want to do is sit in a room with their smack. What do you do? You made the damn laws with the intent that it would be their personal choice, so the answer is nothing.
The crux of the matter rests on whether you think more or less people would use drugs in a legalized environment, and then whether you think that the usage itself is a significant detriment to the average person. I hope I've show why you to the former you should be skeptical that more people wouldn't use. We know people make bad decisions when it comes to short term pleasures that have long term detriments (smoking, getting fat, GAMBLING, etc). I can imagine the average 20 year old being able to make a responsible decision about drug use if the pros and cons were explained to them, but then if I go out and TALK to the average 20 year old, I quickly realize I'm kidding myself. To the latter, I think any experience with drugs or those who use them will tell you that the usage is bad. Yes, some of that comes from complications that arise out of shortages, but I can tell you that when someone who likes heroin has as much heroin as they want, that's what they do. Heroin. They don't have to steal from their parents or anything, but that doesn't mean we should be throwing a party or anything. And people on meth are just plain bad period, irrespective of whether they have enough or not. People using pot, on the other hand, are pretty much fine.
And that leads me to my final point, which would be forget about full legalization, because in a real world context it would lead to shit, and support something better, like the legalization of certain drugs that have a lot fewer cons attached, and in which the ultimate detriment to the average person (and therefore society) is a lot more reasonable, if it exists at all. I.e. support marijuana and forget about most of the others.
Cheers.
But all the "artists have gigs" line really means is that there is a revenue stream that doesn't include selling pirateable material (well... you could cam a concert and then show that to people, but that's hardly the same thing). Anyhow, to the sound engineers etc, that revenue stream would (if the idea works) then go to pay for them. Just because there wouldn't be any money from selling CD's that could be used to pay them, doesn't mean they wouldn't get payed.
None of that is of course to say I have any idea whether a music industry could be supported nearly entirely through live showings, but it is to say that if it was tried it wouldn't imply that anyone not actually up on stage was automatically getting screwed. The money source just shifts.
that any discussion of semantics like this is really pointless if you're not going back to the original text. There are actually a number of versions of the creation myth, dating to various times and places. I know that in one (that I believe dates farther back than the one we currently "use") man was created first, and then animals to entertain him, not him last like in the bibles you read today. Anyhow, my point is that for all I know if you go back to the original Hebrew or Aramaic the tree isn't even called the tree of "Knowledge of Good and Evil," and maybe god didn't say it would kill them, he said it would "destroy them" which you could argue it did, in which case he wasn't lying, but the definition of whatever word kill or destroy is actually coming from is what you need (with the appropriate knowledge of the relevant language) to really make a case either way.
So I guess what I'm saying is that most English translations today are trash anyway, because they've been bastardized over and over by people writing what they want something to mean, or mistakenly think it means, or prefer it to mean so it's easier to digest, or doesn't upset anyone, etc etc, so I wouldn't come to any conclusions on what god supposedly did or did not do off of one.
was the incredible number of stories that became tagged with "haha." Maybe I'm not in the majority with this opinion, but it came off as childish, and it annoyed me that any time a story about something marginally bad happening to any of the slashdot appointed evils ran, I could always count on it being tagged "haha." It just put images in my mind of a bunch of 12 years going "LOL FAGS," and I hated that, of course, because to some degree I come here for the maturity of the discussion. Maybe I totally misinterpreted the sense of that haha, but either way, that is one tag I'm not sad to see go.
Cheers.
Our economy is a capitalist economy. It is built on greed. And yes, it is absolutely the job of the the Monsanto leadership to pursue profit. If individuals in the corporation don't, they get replaced, and it's as simple as that. So if you would rather not think about it in terms of morality (which is probably a good idea anyway), think about it in terms of pragmatism. Corporations act selfishly. In fact, our economy depends on that. But it also depends on lawmakers to create an environment in which that selfish impulse works to the betterment of society. That's the invisible hand, and when that isn't working, it is absolutely the fault of lawmakers, and not the fault of individually greedy corporations. Because after all, that's how we expect them to behave.
How about if your goal is simply to tax the wealthy you simply tax them without getting internet commerce involved?. The argument against an internet tax is that internet commerce doesn't really require any of the services that taxes pay for in the same way that a brick and mortar store does (i.e. emergency services, etc). Please don't weigh that against some sense that people ordering online are wealthier and therefore need to be taxed when they do so. If you want the rich to pay more in taxes, change what their income bracket pays in income taxes or something like that, but please lets not harm internet commerce instead.
I mean hell, there are plenty of things that are predominantly in the realm of the "wealthy" rather than the poor; golf, restaurants, COMPUTERS, lets tax all of those too. Or not.
Cheers.
This actually has been shown not be true. To the extent that lower taxes boost the economy, and a larger economy generates more revenue in taxes, lower taxes have been shown in a fair a mount of cases to actually _increase_ the amount of money at the government's disposal, but in any case they very rarely reduce total revenue in the way you are thinking, except of course in the short term.
I'm not going to link to anything (although I believe the Economist ran an article a month or so back to the effect of what I'm saying if you care to hunt for it) but I wanted you to know that in practice things don't work that way; i.e. you really need to eliminate certain taxes to cut down on the amount of money the gov has - taking 10 percent off the top will only come back to bite you (I use that loosely) if dropping tax revenue is your goal.
we already have a VP that owns a ton of stock in a particular oil company decide who gets reconstruction contracts in Iraq...
>>That is an illustration of how nasty and flawed the entire system of copyright is.
Why can't we think in terms other than black and white when it comes to copyright here? That's really an example of how the _entire system_ is flawed? Or maybe just that part. An overly broad and abusive definition of derivative works being used to the detriment of society is not an indictment of copyright as a whole, and you shouldn't try to make it one. It's an indictment of overly broad and abusive definitions of derivative works. Let's leave it at that, so as to leave open the debate on copyright to more shades of grey, expecting the best answer to IP to land somewhere between everything and nothing, as answers tend to be in these cases.
Cheers.
But since Iocane comes from Australia...
The price of a cpu at a given subjective quality level hasn't changed much, i.e. top of the line cpus tend to cost about what they did a few years ago, but if you think I can't get a 1.8ghz p4 for far far less than when it came out, or that the newer chips won't be significantly cheaper in a few years, I'm fairly sure you're way off the mark.
I've been up all night, so maybe that's totally wrong, but I'm pretty sure not. The price of computing has come _way_ down over they years. The price of converting solar energy to electricity has not, and that is the orginal poster's complaint.
>>The reason these people are laid off is because the companies want even more profits, not because they are losing money during "bad times."
I'm not sure if this was written with what most slashdotters seem to have in mind when it is, but why is this implied to be bad behavior? Corporations are not branches of the government's welfare division. So if you want to write that using layoffs during good years to boost stock value and hence the value of executive stock options is bad, and complain about that, fine. But this idea that somehow unprofitable (or even less profitable) divisions in a large company shouldn't be eliminated or trimmed, or that waste is a good thing because it keeps people employed, doesn't make sense. Just like the music industry does not have a right to make money for x + y years simply because they made money for x years, employees don't have a right to continue to be employed simply because they have been in the past. My condolences go out to those who lost their jobs, and I know it's unpleasant, but we DO live in a capitalist society, and that's the way things work - distinctly for the better I might add. You happen to work in an inefficient or unprofitable section of a company, sometimes you get let go. That isn't some viciously evil idea by executives, its just economics.
My condolences again do go out to those fired, but really.
This is an overly simplistic view. The people that orchestrated the war in Iraq were not doing it out of any fear of job security. Obviously neither the position of Secretary of Defense, Vice president, or Deputy Secretary of Defense are going to go away if we aren't locked in a state of ever present war. It may be true that corporations in the defense and arms business have a vested interest in fomenting world conflict, but to imply that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al led us to war out of some perceived fear that they would become useless organs of government is ludicrous.
They went to war because they thought they could win easily, and it would be a good idea. They were wrong, on a number of levels, but that doesn't mean they're happy about or moreover intended the current situation over there, and to imply anything else, like I said, is pretty ridiculous.
this emerged at least partially out of their previous efforts with "media pcs." On of the obvious (but largely unspoken) problem they ran into there is that the PC with mouse and keyboard is just a shitty way to interact with media. Touchscreens, on the other hand, obviously aren't. So I think that despite the fact that they are initially of course selling this only to businesses, that will be the ultimate placement of this technology. It finally allows people to look at video, music, photos, etc, on a living room computer in a way that doesn't clash immensely with the intended atmosphere of the room. So bravo to Microsoft for making an appealing product, it'll be interesting to see what Apple's response is if this table ultimately becomes successful, as media is one of Apple's important domains. But either way, it's one of the few times MS may not be lying when they say a new paradigm is arriving. Should be fun to watch.