You're fighting Apple zealots. Besides, I don't see much resemblence to the TiBook, except maybe the recessed keyboard. The Porsche design is much more angular and has an entirely different color scheme and accents.
> It already has a usb connector, and it would be > cheaper and more useful to include a diskonkey
No it wouldn't. The player is just a USB device and has (almost 100% likely) no host controller, and USB memory devices require a host controller (plus lots of software drivers) to be read. The USB bus is a master-slave setup, and plugging a DiskOnKey into the Sony player would result in two slave devices being connected together without a master controller, which is completely useless.
Good point, and for just that functionality it's way overpriced. The NetworkWorldFusion article then also probably has the power usage figures wrong, because it makes no sense why it would only run for 1.5h reading DVDs vs. 10h reading regular CDs if it's not actually doing video decoding on the DVD.
> And they'll probably come to market with a more > useful replacement for memorystick, too.
Such as no memory card slot at all, because what's the bloody point? Sony is just putting MS slots into everything it makes nowadays in order to force the standard down people's throats, whether it makes sense to or not. This is a CD and DVD player, not a memory card player. If I want a memory card player, I'll buy one of those. Why increase the cost of a rotating media player by also making it play other types of media?
> I was not trying to insult your political beliefs.
Didn't take it as such. We're just having a discourse.
> Why else do you want to remove guns from society
I never claimed such a thing. In fact I believe I said that I'm not at all against regulated gun ownership. I'm just exasperated at the idiocy of not being allowed to drive a car without learning how to use it, or not being able to string electrical wiring throughout my house without being certified, yet being able to go out and buy highly lethal weapons like candy.
I don't buy the self-defense argument for a moment. Every single guy (by far mostly guys!) that I know that's into guns (and by golly here in the South that's just about everyone) does it for the thrill and machismo and manliness of it. A bit of that little-boy hero day dreaming of rescuing the damsel in distress. I mean just look at the gleaming in your own eyes when you start talking guns with other guys (I've checked a few of your posts)--you love THE GUNS THEMSELVES, not (just, or so much) their "freedom-preserving" qualities. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but quit using the high moral ground as an excuse for your fetish.
> I will stand before all those who threaten my family, my country > and my freedom and I will do it armed to the teeth.
I'm more concerned what you'll do armed to the teeth while under the influence of a bit of bubbly. I assume you'd still take your concealed weapon along with you--after all, those dark alleys around pubs and bars can be pretty treacherous at night, what better place to take advantage of the empowering qualities of the gun? Say I might have accidentally put a little dent in your car with my car door and we're getting into a little argument over it. Do I have to count on your ability to hold your liquor to not cross a threshold where you're going to put an end to my insolence with that gun in your jacket? I'm afraid there's even more research showing that even good people with a gun in their hands are more likely to use it. It was pretty frightening to read the results of some research to find out how many people would be willing to press a button that would extinguish a human life somewhere on earth if there were no consequence attached to it and no-one would ever find out. How much more entitled would one feel to take a human life in the name of self-defence?
Well, that gets into the social engineering aspect of crime, which really has nothing to do with gun control. I fully agree with the socio-economic approach to crime fighting, but you also will have the hardest time changing society that way. During the second half of last century western Europe was arguably a more socially and economically just environment, that probably more than anything else was the cause for low crime. But that balance is shifting now towards more US-modelled social darwinist economies with growing economic disparities. That is probably also one of the reasons we see an increase in violence. But like I said, you will find it pretty hard to change society that way, so you have to look for next-best alternatives.
Just because of price alone. You can get HomePNA 2.0 cards for $10 (just an example, do a search on PriceWatch for more), they're PCI, and they all use the same Broadcom chip so they're essentially the same card. HomePlug is A LOT more expensive at the moment and only seems to be available in USB right now. The other nice thing about HomePNA is that you can simply daisy-chain a bunch of computers together using simple phone cable, without needing a hub or anything, just like in the old coax days.
I've heard some people having problems when running the network over their primary phone line (although many others haven't had problems). In that case simply use the other pair of wires for line 2--even most older homes are wired for two lines. Heck, just get two cards and try it out--if it works fine for you, you saved yourself a bunch of dough. If it doesn't, you're only out $20 (for two cards).
> How exactly did the much-touted gun control laws of Europe prevent this from happening?
You completely missed my point that it wasn't the gun control laws themselves that kept gun violence low, but rather the low numbers of guns in the population. So whatever limits these numbers should help lower gun violence. It's not enough to have gun control laws, you need effective ways of sealing off all avenues of clandestine weapons into the population. During the Cold War the commies did that very effectively at their expense for us, but nowadays it's a lot trickier.
Hardly. Statistics exist in order to be manipulated, and you have to weigh more than just one source of numbers to judge their worth. In this case, gun control IS a highly political topic, so political spectrum matters very much. That does not mean that unbiased figures are impossible to obtain, so I will definitely look up the other sources that you cited.
> concealed carry laws have been proven to reduce violent crime
I'm afraid I can't take you at your word. So far most of the organizations that have reached this conclusion had a definite pro-gun or pro-laissez-faire agenda. There are even more studies concluding that the likelyhood of injury and death is considerably higher when victims also have guns, since that can lead to panic or one-upmanship in the perpetrator (amongst many other reasons, such as the victim owning the gun without being trained in its use).
However, you need to make a distinction between proponents of gun abolishment and those of gun control. I don't believe that guns should be abolished, but just about any other potentially harmful product is regulated in some way--including cars, chemicals, medications etc.--so I don't see why guns should be an exception. Tracking guns is not the same as abolishing them, so let's not pretend it is.
A study of Europe over the last twenty or thirty years can be very enlightening. Most western European countries have had strict gun control for a long time, and (especially illegal) gun ownership in the population was much lower than in the US. Coincidentally shooting deaths in Europe overall were also about two orders of magnitude lower than in the US, despite an overall larger population. This changed quite dramatically after the Iron Curtain came down and the black market was flooded with Eastern Block military weapons. Illegal gun ownership increased dramatically, and shooting deaths in the 90s also increased considerably over the preceding decades. This would lead one to conclude that shooting deaths are indeed related to the density of guns in the population. Reducing this density by any (moral and ethical) means should also decrease the number of deaths.
> A 'Standard' battery form factor (AAA, AA, C, D)
None of these are likely to happen anytime soon (well, possibly D, but how popular are those?), certainly not AAA and AA. But since many consumer devices use pairs of these, you might see fuel cells the shape of two AAA or AA side-by-side, making it possible to power Palm PDAs and portable CD players. One of the first markets could very well be laptop battery replacement fuel cells. Most laptop batteries are big enough to squeeze a current generation fuel cell into that form factor. I'd love to be able to buy a fuel cell to replace my Inspiron battery and give me a few more hours runtime.
I've noticed several posts by this guy in the last few days just spouting off techno-babble like he was still in school and learning this stuff as we speak. Which of course he probably is.
Never heard of it, but went to the site and read up on them. All I have to say is that I value very little the opinion of any organization that considers Thatcher a pioneer of social change and justice. It's pretty clear which side of the political spectrum the NCPA is on, and it ain't mine.
> 22,500 miles x 4 bounces equals almost 100,000 miles. Coupled with > the MPEG processing done at DirecTV's operations center, > this adds up to a delay of about six seconds.
Given an overall system processing delay more than an order of magnitude larger than the total signal propagation delay through space, why even bother mentioning it, let alone do the math? That 100K miles adds only a small fraction of a second to the many seconds of processing on the ground and in the transponder.
> The gun's rightful owner is generally not the perp.
Yes, but you've trimmed your search tree down from 50 million gun owners to a likely individual in the chain of possession of that gun. Chances are that the owner knows the perp or has at least some notion regarding the next possessor of the gun (the six degrees of separation between owner and perp:-). Won't always work, but we're talking improving the odds here, not setting them to 1.
> As the kit is not a working firearm, there is not a legal requirement > to keep a record of the individual purchasing the kit
Good points, but this detail could be easily fixed legally. Why not require conversion kits to undergo the same ballistics registration? Seems like a no-brainer.
> criminals would get their barrels custom made by a freind who's a gunsmith
It seems like a valid argument, but I believe statistics show that a high percentage of gun violence is opportunistic and spontaneous, not involving planning ahead or careful gun selection. Given that you can't eliminate gun violence altogether even with strict gun laws (look at Europe, which still has a fair amount of shootings), the next best goal should be to minimize casualties. Therefore arguments that method X or method Y won't completely eliminate shooting deaths shouldn't bear as much weight as they do. Any measures that could potentially cut annual shooting deaths in say half should be seriously considered.
Slashdot Mirror
...is you having to excuse yourself for a quick trip to the photocopier every ten words or so.
> this laptop is clearly and squarely aimed at [...] Apple's highest-margin computer
How? It doesn't even LOOK like the Apple notebook. You have to really WANT to see a TiBook in it to notice much similarity.
> nock off of
The mind boggles. When will the insanity end?
> in part because it's an obvious knock-off, and anyone driving it would probably be ridculed.
Lexus owners don't seem to be ridiculed for driving Mercedes knock-offs.
> Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition OEM Version $199.98
Not to mention that service packs are free, whereas someone going from Mac OS 10.whatever to 10.2 would have paid for it twice.
You're fighting Apple zealots. Besides, I don't see much resemblence to the TiBook, except maybe the recessed keyboard. The Porsche design is much more angular and has an entirely different color scheme and accents.
> It already has a usb connector, and it would be
> cheaper and more useful to include a diskonkey
No it wouldn't. The player is just a USB device and has (almost 100% likely) no host controller, and USB memory devices require a host controller (plus lots of software drivers) to be read. The USB bus is a master-slave setup, and plugging a DiskOnKey into the Sony player would result in two slave devices being connected together without a master controller, which is completely useless.
> It plays DVD-ROMs, not DVD-Video discs
Good point, and for just that functionality it's way overpriced. The NetworkWorldFusion article then also probably has the power usage figures wrong, because it makes no sense why it would only run for 1.5h reading DVDs vs. 10h reading regular CDs if it's not actually doing video decoding on the DVD.
> and it can play from DVDs [...] more than 20Gb in ONE SINGLE MEDIA
Yeah, but that would be only pre-recorded data DVDs. If you burn your own DVD-Rs, you're back to 4.7GB worth of MP3 tracks.
> And they'll probably come to market with a more
> useful replacement for memorystick, too.
Such as no memory card slot at all, because what's the bloody point? Sony is just putting MS slots into everything it makes nowadays in order to force the standard down people's throats, whether it makes sense to or not. This is a CD and DVD player, not a memory card player. If I want a memory card player, I'll buy one of those. Why increase the cost of a rotating media player by also making it play other types of media?
> I was not trying to insult your political beliefs.
Didn't take it as such. We're just having a discourse.
> Why else do you want to remove guns from society
I never claimed such a thing. In fact I believe I said that I'm not at all against regulated gun ownership. I'm just exasperated at the idiocy of not being allowed to drive a car without learning how to use it, or not being able to string electrical wiring throughout my house without being certified, yet being able to go out and buy highly lethal weapons like candy.
I don't buy the self-defense argument for a moment. Every single guy (by far mostly guys!) that I know that's into guns (and by golly here in the South that's just about everyone) does it for the thrill and machismo and manliness of it. A bit of that little-boy hero day dreaming of rescuing the damsel in distress. I mean just look at the gleaming in your own eyes when you start talking guns with other guys (I've checked a few of your posts)--you love THE GUNS THEMSELVES, not (just, or so much) their "freedom-preserving" qualities. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but quit using the high moral ground as an excuse for your fetish.
> I will stand before all those who threaten my family, my country
> and my freedom and I will do it armed to the teeth.
I'm more concerned what you'll do armed to the teeth while under the influence of a bit of bubbly. I assume you'd still take your concealed weapon along with you--after all, those dark alleys around pubs and bars can be pretty treacherous at night, what better place to take advantage of the empowering qualities of the gun? Say I might have accidentally put a little dent in your car with my car door and we're getting into a little argument over it. Do I have to count on your ability to hold your liquor to not cross a threshold where you're going to put an end to my insolence with that gun in your jacket? I'm afraid there's even more research showing that even good people with a gun in their hands are more likely to use it. It was pretty frightening to read the results of some research to find out how many people would be willing to press a button that would extinguish a human life somewhere on earth if there were no consequence attached to it and no-one would ever find out. How much more entitled would one feel to take a human life in the name of self-defence?
> Poor people in general have higher crime rates
Well, that gets into the social engineering aspect of crime, which really has nothing to do with gun control. I fully agree with the socio-economic approach to crime fighting, but you also will have the hardest time changing society that way. During the second half of last century western Europe was arguably a more socially and economically just environment, that probably more than anything else was the cause for low crime. But that balance is shifting now towards more US-modelled social darwinist economies with growing economic disparities. That is probably also one of the reasons we see an increase in violence. But like I said, you will find it pretty hard to change society that way, so you have to look for next-best alternatives.
> they're very obvious
Obvious to whom? To you, because you WANT to believe it?
Just because of price alone. You can get HomePNA 2.0 cards for $10 (just an example, do a search on PriceWatch for more), they're PCI, and they all use the same Broadcom chip so they're essentially the same card. HomePlug is A LOT more expensive at the moment and only seems to be available in USB right now. The other nice thing about HomePNA is that you can simply daisy-chain a bunch of computers together using simple phone cable, without needing a hub or anything, just like in the old coax days. I've heard some people having problems when running the network over their primary phone line (although many others haven't had problems). In that case simply use the other pair of wires for line 2--even most older homes are wired for two lines. Heck, just get two cards and try it out--if it works fine for you, you saved yourself a bunch of dough. If it doesn't, you're only out $20 (for two cards).
> How exactly did the much-touted gun control laws of Europe prevent this from happening?
You completely missed my point that it wasn't the gun control laws themselves that kept gun violence low, but rather the low numbers of guns in the population. So whatever limits these numbers should help lower gun violence. It's not enough to have gun control laws, you need effective ways of sealing off all avenues of clandestine weapons into the population. During the Cold War the commies did that very effectively at their expense for us, but nowadays it's a lot trickier.
> Political spectrum is irrelavant.
Hardly. Statistics exist in order to be manipulated, and you have to weigh more than just one source of numbers to judge their worth. In this case, gun control IS a highly political topic, so political spectrum matters very much. That does not mean that unbiased figures are impossible to obtain, so I will definitely look up the other sources that you cited.
> concealed carry laws have been proven to reduce violent crime
I'm afraid I can't take you at your word. So far most of the organizations that have reached this conclusion had a definite pro-gun or pro-laissez-faire agenda. There are even more studies concluding that the likelyhood of injury and death is considerably higher when victims also have guns, since that can lead to panic or one-upmanship in the perpetrator (amongst many other reasons, such as the victim owning the gun without being trained in its use).
However, you need to make a distinction between proponents of gun abolishment and those of gun control. I don't believe that guns should be abolished, but just about any other potentially harmful product is regulated in some way--including cars, chemicals, medications etc.--so I don't see why guns should be an exception. Tracking guns is not the same as abolishing them, so let's not pretend it is.
A study of Europe over the last twenty or thirty years can be very enlightening. Most western European countries have had strict gun control for a long time, and (especially illegal) gun ownership in the population was much lower than in the US. Coincidentally shooting deaths in Europe overall were also about two orders of magnitude lower than in the US, despite an overall larger population. This changed quite dramatically after the Iron Curtain came down and the black market was flooded with Eastern Block military weapons. Illegal gun ownership increased dramatically, and shooting deaths in the 90s also increased considerably over the preceding decades. This would lead one to conclude that shooting deaths are indeed related to the density of guns in the population. Reducing this density by any (moral and ethical) means should also decrease the number of deaths.
> A 'Standard' battery form factor (AAA, AA, C, D)
None of these are likely to happen anytime soon (well, possibly D, but how popular are those?), certainly not AAA and AA. But since many consumer devices use pairs of these, you might see fuel cells the shape of two AAA or AA side-by-side, making it possible to power Palm PDAs and portable CD players. One of the first markets could very well be laptop battery replacement fuel cells. Most laptop batteries are big enough to squeeze a current generation fuel cell into that form factor. I'd love to be able to buy a fuel cell to replace my Inspiron battery and give me a few more hours runtime.
...after reading some of his other stuff, his trolls can be pretty funny. He might deserve the points after all.
I've noticed several posts by this guy in the last few days just spouting off techno-babble like he was still in school and learning this stuff as we speak. Which of course he probably is.
> See The NCPA
Never heard of it, but went to the site and read up on them. All I have to say is that I value very little the opinion of any organization that considers Thatcher a pioneer of social change and justice. It's pretty clear which side of the political spectrum the NCPA is on, and it ain't mine.
> 22,500 miles x 4 bounces equals almost 100,000 miles. Coupled with
> the MPEG processing done at DirecTV's operations center,
> this adds up to a delay of about six seconds.
Given an overall system processing delay more than an order of magnitude larger than the total signal propagation delay through space, why even bother mentioning it, let alone do the math? That 100K miles adds only a small fraction of a second to the many seconds of processing on the ground and in the transponder.
> The gun's rightful owner is generally not the perp.
:-). Won't always work, but we're talking improving the odds here, not setting them to 1.
Yes, but you've trimmed your search tree down from 50 million gun owners to a likely individual in the chain of possession of that gun. Chances are that the owner knows the perp or has at least some notion regarding the next possessor of the gun (the six degrees of separation between owner and perp
> As the kit is not a working firearm, there is not a legal requirement
> to keep a record of the individual purchasing the kit
Good points, but this detail could be easily fixed legally. Why not require conversion kits to undergo the same ballistics registration? Seems like a no-brainer.
> criminals would get their barrels custom made by a freind who's a gunsmith
It seems like a valid argument, but I believe statistics show that a high percentage of gun violence is opportunistic and spontaneous, not involving planning ahead or careful gun selection. Given that you can't eliminate gun violence altogether even with strict gun laws (look at Europe, which still has a fair amount of shootings), the next best goal should be to minimize casualties. Therefore arguments that method X or method Y won't completely eliminate shooting deaths shouldn't bear as much weight as they do. Any measures that could potentially cut annual shooting deaths in say half should be seriously considered.