I hate to be really cruel, but if they really wanted to pound it into MS that they've been bad, they'd set up a percentage to be used funding open source government software solutions for nearly ever level of EU government.
Since it's hypothetical anyway, I don't feel bad about pointing out a problem with this...
The WTO wouldn't look kindly on this: This is very close to what the US was doing to countries whom were dumping steel on the US market. Dumping (selling below cost/value) is illegal in the US, but not so much in other countries. The US basically imposed a tarriff of the full cost of the dumped foreign steel, and the money was given to US steel companies. (An idea very similar in concept to giving the fine money from Microsoft to its European competitors)
The WTO ruled against the US, and set penalties. Unless things have changed since I last looked, those penalties are still in force.
I wouldn't doubt the 'be fair' admonition is little more than that - do everything in your power to make sure the final decision is solid (ie. let's not have a series of reversals, etc. -- don't give Microsoft (or anybody else) a legitimate (or stupid loophole) reason to argue with the final judgement. If Microsoft loses, then make sure they understand what was expected, and how they failed to comply; if the EU loses, the same applies. Do everything possible to keep this issue from resurfacing in a few years.
Nice to see that ILM had the sense to use Ethernet rather than InfiniBand. IB has some great features in hardware. Too bad the software to drive it is less than wonderful.
Simple: an 8% difference in clock speed doesn't necessarily equate to an 8% difference in speed -- even if everything else is identical. If the Acer Duo were to have a 2.16 chip in it (and I'm sure it will soon enough), the difference in speed between the Acer books would be roughly the same (1.4%)
It's nothing new; a decade ago people were wondering why a 486/50 was frequently faster than a 486DX2/66 -- and it's because the clock speed doesn't tell the whole story, and never has.
With the BSD license, the comparison would be if there existed a basket full of an infinite amount of food and someone took some out. Would that hurt the person that owned the basket? Would that hurt the next person to take some food?
No, but in this world, a mugger would hurt the person that owned the basket in an entirely different way, for an entirely different reason: Control of the basket, so she (alone) can profit from the infinite amount of food (by selling it).
(Not to really stand on either side of the GPL/BSD debate; I like both and don't care for the argument)
The gp has a valid point: Sure; neither you or the mugger have rules to follow. But what good does the 'extra' freedom do you when the mugger kills you because there is no crime, no punishment, no prosecution?
Freedom isn't just about the lack of rules; but to find an optimal balance of competing interests. There is no such thing as absolute freedom for all, because what one person wants to do, another will disagree with. For example, one person wants to copulate with a particular woman. The woman does not. One of the two interests will have its 'freedom' restricted by the choice of the other.
Without rules, life quickly (and history has shown us, inevitably) towards domination by the most violent. The people with the deadliest weapons take control, and set up 'rules' that only benefit the brutal.
Fortunately, the seminary classes are not part of the public school curriculum. They are not taught on the school's (ie. public) property, nor are they funded by taxes in any way.
Basically what happens is for one class period per semester, any student can get 'religious release time.' Students can leave school property and receive religious instruction from whatever faith they belong, so long as the instructor provides attendance data to prove the students were in attendance.
The LDS church typically buys property near (and often adjacent to) the school, and builds its 'seminary building' there. They also offer their facilities (free of charge) to any other religions who provide a (adult) instructor.
The state gets an additional benefit from the program (which is also typically what justifies its existence): Instead of the state paying for the facilities and instructors to handle the students for that class period, the bill is footed by private organizations (although predominantly the LDS church). This reduces the overhead of running Utah's underfunded and overcrowded schools by some-odd 10% or so.
I doubt the figure for the number of Mormons that believe in creationism is as high as 90%, though. In fact, it's frequently part of the biology curriculum to touch (in in about two sentences) the fact that there is no official policy/doctrine on evolution. This generally pacifies students who would otherwise insist that 'evolution is against my religion,' and makes the teacher's job easier.
Here's a question (and it is a question): What's to say Sol isn't moving at.577c? (I'm not an astronomer, so this is a question, not rhetoric) Sol may not be moving very rapidly relative to Earth, or the Milky Way, do we really know what its absolute speed is?
I recall being taught that speed is relative to a particular reference -- which itself could be moving with respect to another reference, and so on.
I know we can determine the relative speed celestial objects are moving in relation to each other. Can we determine the absolute speed of anything, or does it all depend on the frame of reference? (ie. can we say for certain that while our relative speed may be very similar to observed celestial objects, our absolute speed is 'this'?)
I'd like to add that this difference in time is both currently and commonly measured.
Atomic clocks have this kind of accuracy.
NIST has some that are so accurate and precice that if you have two clocks on different floors in the same building, the difference in relative velocity between the two (due to Earth's rotation) is measurable. If you swap their places, the results are still consistent.
It's even more apparent when looking at clock skew of a ground-based atomic clock, and one that is in orbit (such as any GPS sattelite).
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
totally...missed...the joke.
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
That's not what our bodies were designed for.
Wow. Intelligent design is being implied from a user named "Cro Magnon".
That's a neat bit of irony. Or at least a good excuse to take things out of context.
You know, I think I qualified my statement with 'arable' land.
I live in the States' second driest state. We get less rain per year than many get in a month.
It's incredibly wasteful to use water on something as superficial as a lawn.
Ever heard of xeroscaping? It's fairly popular, and is becoming increasingly so in desert climates (such as say, the SouthWestern quarter of the United States).
The bottom line is that there is no lawn. The water required to grow it is simply not extant.
Many an environmentalist is acutally quite concerned with the amount of fresh (ie. irrigation) water that will be available in the US. Decades of misuse are taking their toll.
To grow anything for alcohol, you need abundant fresh water. This is something that isn't as abundant as many would like to believe. (My father's a civil engineer whose entire career is in the handling of large quantities of water-- some of it industrial, but most of it municipal. If anybody knows about water issues, it's him.)
Every drunk in the world has dreamed of such an ethanol supply. Ethanol is extremely profitable stuff -- espescially in the dilute form that people drink. It's considerably more expensive to make alcohol pure enough to burn in an engine.
Making cheap, pure, abundant ethanol has been a dream of nearly everybody who drinks (or makes) alcohol. Strides have been made, but it's still a woefully inefficient process.
Look -- I'm all for making what ethanol we can from what would otherwise go to the landfill. Just don't give in to the delusion that it will make such a large dent in oil usage.
Ethanol combustion is not very energetic compared to hydrocarbones
I'm eager to nitpick: Ethanol is a hydrocarbon. CH3-CH2-OH
That being said, you're still right: ethanol combustion is less energetic than petroleum. The same thing can be said of ethanol's cousins, including methanol. But you can turbocharge alcohols more than is possible with petroleum as well -- a big reason why many auto racing diciplines use methanol over gasoline.
The industrial process used to produce wood alcohol (methanol), for example, often consumes way more energy than the final product represents.
Considering that the large-scale industrial process that creates methanol uses natural gas (methane), it's important to realize that for all intents and purposes, methanol is still a fossil fuel.
I have no problem with alternate forms of energy; ethanol can solve part of the problem -- but it isn't a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet for the world's energy problems, and I'll happily shoot down anybody who claims otherwise. Contrary to what proponents would like to believe, the energy and infrastructure requirements to produce ethanol are well known. Investment money is plentiful, as is motivation. But you can't beat the laws of physics, which end up trumping wishful thinking.
There isn't enough (arable) land in the US to grow sufficient amounts of biomass to power the country and feed it. Even Popular Science changed their entire opinion on ethanol within a few issues: First they were gung-ho, saying ethanol is the way of the future. Then respected scientists from prestigious universities gave the magazine the facts -- facts which changed Popular Science's entire view on the feasability of an ethanol economy.
64 bit is a good thing, but don't make it out to be more than it is. There isn't a need for 64 bit notebooks. The only big reason for going to 64-bit is the increase in the maximum amount of addressable memory. MacBooks support a maximum of 2GB of memory -- you can't even install enough memory to make 'mere' 32-bit addressing an issue. You would decrease battery life, drive up cost, and lose time to market among other things.
For instance if you can only use 2GB of physical memory, 32-bit programs have almost always show themselves to run faster than the same code compiled for 64-bit. Things like cache and memory bandwidth have their due, and 64-bits requires more of both.
64 bit is great for server and high performance scientific computing, but nobody in their right mind uses a notebook for these tasks. They use racks of machines in a cold room, sucking down power from the grid.
Too many people are still entrenched in the early/mid-90's Nintendo/Sega/Sony console marketing dogma that 'more bits is always better.'
If you can't possibly take advantage of a 64-bit CPU in the computer (and the MacBooks can't), then what's the point of the higher price and development time?
Also, explain this: - If the innovative games aren't out there, then how the HELL is buying the CRAP that *IS* on the shelves going to help any?
Answer: IT WON'T.
Well, it will lower everyone's expectations of what a game that isn't crap is. It will also provide funding to develop new games. (Probably crap)
- How will buying the CRAP that IS on the shelves going to encourage publishers to market games that aren't CRAP?
Answer: IT WON'T.
More importantly, buying crap on shelves will lead them to believe their product is not crap, and that they're doing something right.
Bottom line: They aren't entitled to customers or revenue. They have to earn both.
I wonder if the people preparing the statment have close ties to the MPAA or RIAA; the sense of being entitled to loyal customers and high revenue is similar.
Bottom line: People don't buy things they do not want. If nobody is buying your 'happy product', then it's probably because they don't desire it. Even food falls into this classification -- people aren't going to buy food unless they want it. (Yes, people need food; but after enough time, they generally want food as well.) Frankly, I haven't seen any games lately that are worth my money (even used).
This seems to be the result of incompetence, not an attempt to create their own proprietary RSS version.
I'm reluctant to attribute incompetence to anything that can be as easily attributed to premature release (for sales/marketing reasons).
I have little doubt an Apple developer is saying "Yup, it isn't finished, and it's a piece of crap. I know it, but I had twenty minutes until we started stamping CD's. I've got it patched, but it won't be released for a few weeks."
In other words, I'm reluctant to blame a developer who may have had the task dumped in his lap with little or no time to develop it before it shipped.
His Op Center stuff and the other crap he's been pulling (Tom Clancy presents. . ..) is really annoying.
You realize that 'Op Center' isn't authored by Tom Clancy, right? It was an idea he had, but didn't want to pursue it -- so another author asked if he could use the idea.
Since it was Clancy's idea, and it was a good marketing ploy, they put Clancy's name on the cover, even though the introduction clearly states that he didn't write it.
The stuff that Tom Clancy actually wrote is still first-class; it's a shame that he's allowed his name to be plastered on things as a marketing gimmick, but relatively few professional sports players get to make money on endorsements -- it's almost unheard of for an author to receive endorsement contracts.
I'd never be seen buying cheap stuff like monster cables, when I can audiophile grade stuff at $500 per foot. With special risers that hold the wire above the ground in order to remove any parasitic capacitance from the carpet...
Or wooden knobs that are about $100 a piece. (Audiophile grade, of course).
The irrational urge for something better than I'm capable of telling any difference whatsoever.
You know-- like getting a sports car to drive like an old man at 55 mph, or that nifty video card that will give me an even higher framerate (that is greater than the display is capable of, let alone my ability to perceive.)
Or the ability to run whatever I want on a 64 node, dual-opteron infiniband cluster...
Option C:) Apple has successfully eliminated the incentive to "steal" music by making it cheaper to buy iTunes tracks than to use alternative backchannels.
Yeah, I remember an economics professor calling this the "opprotunity cost;' a fancy way of saying 'time is money.'
I recall watching video of the keynote when Steve Jobs announced the iTMS -- and he made the identical comparison; that it's cheaper for the consumer to go get a (minimum wage) job, and buy the (correct, known-quality) songs from iTunes, than it is for them to hunt for the music on a filesharing service.
I just hope that they bump up the bitrates of iTMS music sometime; not that it matters much in the situations I listen to my iPods (driving in my car, using an adapter that lets the iPod act as a cd changer), or on mid-grade headphones ($200 or so), I can't tell the difference anyway...
I wasn't aware OO.o for OS X was even at a full 2.0 release state...
Don't forget that Apple has iWork -- I see it as being more likely that they'll extend iWork than it is to work on OO.o
Pages & Keynote aren't at all bad; Apple would need to add ODF support (I can't recall if iWork '06 did this), and they need to create a spreadsheet app.
While MS Access (ie. a database frontend) is nice, for 99% of home users, it's unnecessary and/or overkill. (I can't comment on business use of Access; I've really only had business experience in non-Microsoft environements..)
Except, of course, that some of the worst sex offenders can be found in the clergy.
This statement can be true of any group.
* Some of the worst sex offenders are parents. * Some of the worst sex offenders are school teachers.... * Some of the worst sex offenders are pastry chefs. * Some of the worst sex offenders are kitten vivisection practitioners.
and so on...
You don't see/hear/read about many parents that are sex offenders; similarly unless there are previous convictions, you don't hear about the next-door neighbor being a sex offender. Such cases are (sadly) common and rarely considered newsworthy. If a teacher or clergyman is guilty... that's front-page stuff!
The bottom line is this: You hear about it when a teacher or priest is convicted of sex abuse -- becuase they are placed in positions of trust, and that trust was violated.
Like it or not, religion has an extrememly positive effect for many people. It isn't a universal/perfect solution (because there is none), but religion generally solves more of society's ills than it creates.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be really cruel, but if they really wanted to pound it into MS that they've been bad, they'd set up a percentage to be used funding open source government software solutions for nearly ever level of EU government.
Since it's hypothetical anyway, I don't feel bad about pointing out a problem with this...
The WTO wouldn't look kindly on this: This is very close to what the US was doing to countries whom were dumping steel on the US market. Dumping (selling below cost/value) is illegal in the US, but not so much in other countries. The US basically imposed a tarriff of the full cost of the dumped foreign steel, and the money was given to US steel companies. (An idea very similar in concept to giving the fine money from Microsoft to its European competitors)
The WTO ruled against the US, and set penalties. Unless things have changed since I last looked, those penalties are still in force.
I wouldn't doubt the 'be fair' admonition is little more than that - do everything in your power to make sure the final decision is solid (ie. let's not have a series of reversals, etc. -- don't give Microsoft (or anybody else) a legitimate (or stupid loophole) reason to argue with the final judgement. If Microsoft loses, then make sure they understand what was expected, and how they failed to comply; if the EU loses, the same applies. Do everything possible to keep this issue from resurfacing in a few years.
Nice to see that ILM had the sense to use Ethernet rather than InfiniBand. IB has some great features in hardware. Too bad the software to drive it is less than wonderful.
Simple: an 8% difference in clock speed doesn't necessarily equate to an 8% difference in speed -- even if everything else is identical. If the Acer Duo were to have a 2.16 chip in it (and I'm sure it will soon enough), the difference in speed between the Acer books would be roughly the same (1.4%)
It's nothing new; a decade ago people were wondering why a 486/50 was frequently faster than a 486DX2/66 -- and it's because the clock speed doesn't tell the whole story, and never has.
With the BSD license, the comparison would be if there existed a basket full of an infinite amount of food and someone took some out. Would that hurt the person that owned the basket? Would that hurt the next person to take some food?
No, but in this world, a mugger would hurt the person that owned the basket in an entirely different way, for an entirely different reason: Control of the basket, so she (alone) can profit from the infinite amount of food (by selling it).
(Not to really stand on either side of the GPL/BSD debate; I like both and don't care for the argument)
The gp has a valid point: Sure; neither you or the mugger have rules to follow. But what good does the 'extra' freedom do you when the mugger kills you because there is no crime, no punishment, no prosecution?
Freedom isn't just about the lack of rules; but to find an optimal balance of competing interests. There is no such thing as absolute freedom for all, because what one person wants to do, another will disagree with. For example, one person wants to copulate with a particular woman. The woman does not. One of the two interests will have its 'freedom' restricted by the choice of the other.
Without rules, life quickly (and history has shown us, inevitably) towards domination by the most violent. The people with the deadliest weapons take control, and set up 'rules' that only benefit the brutal.
Fortunately, the seminary classes are not part of the public school curriculum. They are not taught on the school's (ie. public) property, nor are they funded by taxes in any way.
Basically what happens is for one class period per semester, any student can get 'religious release time.' Students can leave school property and receive religious instruction from whatever faith they belong, so long as the instructor provides attendance data to prove the students were in attendance.
The LDS church typically buys property near (and often adjacent to) the school, and builds its 'seminary building' there. They also offer their facilities (free of charge) to any other religions who provide a (adult) instructor.
The state gets an additional benefit from the program (which is also typically what justifies its existence): Instead of the state paying for the facilities and instructors to handle the students for that class period, the bill is footed by private organizations (although predominantly the LDS church). This reduces the overhead of running Utah's underfunded and overcrowded schools by some-odd 10% or so.
I doubt the figure for the number of Mormons that believe in creationism is as high as 90%, though. In fact, it's frequently part of the biology curriculum to touch (in in about two sentences) the fact that there is no official policy/doctrine on evolution. This generally pacifies students who would otherwise insist that 'evolution is against my religion,' and makes the teacher's job easier.
Here's a question (and it is a question): What's to say Sol isn't moving at .577c? (I'm not an astronomer, so this is a question, not rhetoric) Sol may not be moving very rapidly relative to Earth, or the Milky Way, do we really know what its absolute speed is?
I recall being taught that speed is relative to a particular reference -- which itself could be moving with respect to another reference, and so on.
I know we can determine the relative speed celestial objects are moving in relation to each other. Can we determine the absolute speed of anything, or does it all depend on the frame of reference? (ie. can we say for certain that while our relative speed may be very similar to observed celestial objects, our absolute speed is 'this'?)
I'd like to add that this difference in time is both currently and commonly measured.
Atomic clocks have this kind of accuracy.
NIST has some that are so accurate and precice that if you have two clocks on different floors in the same building, the difference in relative velocity between the two (due to Earth's rotation) is measurable. If you swap their places, the results are still consistent.
It's even more apparent when looking at clock skew of a ground-based atomic clock, and one that is in orbit (such as any GPS sattelite).
totally...missed...the joke.
That's not what our bodies were designed for.
Wow. Intelligent design is being implied from a user named "Cro Magnon".
That's a neat bit of irony. Or at least a good excuse to take things out of context.
So Steve Urkel would be a platinum blonde seductress with a goatee?
I'll pass.
You know, I think I qualified my statement with 'arable' land.
I live in the States' second driest state. We get less rain per year than many get in a month.
It's incredibly wasteful to use water on something as superficial as a lawn.
Ever heard of xeroscaping? It's fairly popular, and is becoming increasingly so in desert climates (such as say, the SouthWestern quarter of the United States).
The bottom line is that there is no lawn. The water required to grow it is simply not extant.
Many an environmentalist is acutally quite concerned with the amount of fresh (ie. irrigation) water that will be available in the US. Decades of misuse are taking their toll.
To grow anything for alcohol, you need abundant fresh water. This is something that isn't as abundant as many would like to believe. (My father's a civil engineer whose entire career is in the handling of large quantities of water-- some of it industrial, but most of it municipal. If anybody knows about water issues, it's him.)
Every drunk in the world has dreamed of such an ethanol supply. Ethanol is extremely profitable stuff -- espescially in the dilute form that people drink. It's considerably more expensive to make alcohol pure enough to burn in an engine.
Making cheap, pure, abundant ethanol has been a dream of nearly everybody who drinks (or makes) alcohol. Strides have been made, but it's still a woefully inefficient process.
Look -- I'm all for making what ethanol we can from what would otherwise go to the landfill. Just don't give in to the delusion that it will make such a large dent in oil usage.
Ethanol combustion is not very energetic compared to hydrocarbones
I'm eager to nitpick: Ethanol is a hydrocarbon. CH3-CH2-OH
That being said, you're still right: ethanol combustion is less energetic than petroleum. The same thing can be said of ethanol's cousins, including methanol. But you can turbocharge alcohols more than is possible with petroleum as well -- a big reason why many auto racing diciplines use methanol over gasoline.
The industrial process used to produce wood alcohol (methanol), for example, often consumes way more energy than the final product represents.
Considering that the large-scale industrial process that creates methanol uses natural gas (methane), it's important to realize that for all intents and purposes, methanol is still a fossil fuel.
I have no problem with alternate forms of energy; ethanol can solve part of the problem -- but it isn't a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet for the world's energy problems, and I'll happily shoot down anybody who claims otherwise. Contrary to what proponents would like to believe, the energy and infrastructure requirements to produce ethanol are well known. Investment money is plentiful, as is motivation. But you can't beat the laws of physics, which end up trumping wishful thinking.
There isn't enough (arable) land in the US to grow sufficient amounts of biomass to power the country and feed it. Even Popular Science changed their entire opinion on ethanol within a few issues: First they were gung-ho, saying ethanol is the way of the future. Then respected scientists from prestigious universities gave the magazine the facts -- facts which changed Popular Science's entire view on the feasability of an ethanol economy.
You can feed your car or your kids. Pick one.
64 bit is a good thing, but don't make it out to be more than it is. There isn't a need for 64 bit notebooks. The only big reason for going to 64-bit is the increase in the maximum amount of addressable memory. MacBooks support a maximum of 2GB of memory -- you can't even install enough memory to make 'mere' 32-bit addressing an issue. You would decrease battery life, drive up cost, and lose time to market among other things.
For instance if you can only use 2GB of physical memory, 32-bit programs have almost always show themselves to run faster than the same code compiled for 64-bit. Things like cache and memory bandwidth have their due, and 64-bits requires more of both.
64 bit is great for server and high performance scientific computing, but nobody in their right mind uses a notebook for these tasks. They use racks of machines in a cold room, sucking down power from the grid.
Too many people are still entrenched in the early/mid-90's Nintendo/Sega/Sony console marketing dogma that 'more bits is always better.'
If you can't possibly take advantage of a 64-bit CPU in the computer (and the MacBooks can't), then what's the point of the higher price and development time?
Also, explain this:
- If the innovative games aren't out there, then how the HELL is buying the CRAP that *IS* on the shelves going to help any?
Answer: IT WON'T.
Well, it will lower everyone's expectations of what a game that isn't crap is. It will also provide funding to develop new games. (Probably crap)
- How will buying the CRAP that IS on the shelves going to encourage publishers to market games that aren't CRAP?
Answer: IT WON'T.
More importantly, buying crap on shelves will lead them to believe their product is not crap, and that they're doing something right.
Bottom line: They aren't entitled to customers or revenue. They have to earn both.
I wonder if the people preparing the statment have close ties to the MPAA or RIAA; the sense of being entitled to loyal customers and high revenue is similar.
Bottom line: People don't buy things they do not want. If nobody is buying your 'happy product', then it's probably because they don't desire it. Even food falls into this classification -- people aren't going to buy food unless they want it. (Yes, people need food; but after enough time, they generally want food as well.) Frankly, I haven't seen any games lately that are worth my money (even used).
This seems to be the result of incompetence, not an attempt to create their own proprietary RSS version.
I'm reluctant to attribute incompetence to anything that can be as easily attributed to premature release (for sales/marketing reasons).
I have little doubt an Apple developer is saying "Yup, it isn't finished, and it's a piece of crap. I know it, but I had twenty minutes until we started stamping CD's. I've got it patched, but it won't be released for a few weeks."
In other words, I'm reluctant to blame a developer who may have had the task dumped in his lap with little or no time to develop it before it shipped.
I got past that problem when I realized Nike's "Air Jordan" shoes weren't made by Michael Jordan.
Or when I learned that Microsoft's "Runs On Windows Seal" doesn't mean the program actually runs...
His Op Center stuff and the other crap he's been pulling (Tom Clancy presents. . . .) is really annoying.
You realize that 'Op Center' isn't authored by Tom Clancy, right? It was an idea he had, but didn't want to pursue it -- so another author asked if he could use the idea.
Since it was Clancy's idea, and it was a good marketing ploy, they put Clancy's name on the cover, even though the introduction clearly states that he didn't write it.
The stuff that Tom Clancy actually wrote is still first-class; it's a shame that he's allowed his name to be plastered on things as a marketing gimmick, but relatively few professional sports players get to make money on endorsements -- it's almost unheard of for an author to receive endorsement contracts.
I'd never be seen buying cheap stuff like monster cables, when I can audiophile grade stuff at $500 per foot. With special risers that hold the wire above the ground in order to remove any parasitic capacitance from the carpet...
Or wooden knobs that are about $100 a piece. (Audiophile grade, of course).
The irrational urge for something better than I'm capable of telling any difference whatsoever.
You know-- like getting a sports car to drive like an old man at 55 mph, or that nifty video card that will give me an even higher framerate (that is greater than the display is capable of, let alone my ability to perceive.)
Or the ability to run whatever I want on a 64 node, dual-opteron infiniband cluster...
You know, guy stuff.
Option C:) Apple has successfully eliminated the incentive to "steal" music by making it cheaper to buy iTunes tracks than to use alternative backchannels.
Yeah, I remember an economics professor calling this the "opprotunity cost;' a fancy way of saying 'time is money.'
I recall watching video of the keynote when Steve Jobs announced the iTMS -- and he made the identical comparison; that it's cheaper for the consumer to go get a (minimum wage) job, and buy the (correct, known-quality) songs from iTunes, than it is for them to hunt for the music on a filesharing service.
I just hope that they bump up the bitrates of iTMS music sometime; not that it matters much in the situations I listen to my iPods (driving in my car, using an adapter that lets the iPod act as a cd changer), or on mid-grade headphones ($200 or so), I can't tell the difference anyway...
I wasn't aware OO.o for OS X was even at a full 2.0 release state...
Don't forget that Apple has iWork -- I see it as being more likely that they'll extend iWork than it is to work on OO.o
Pages & Keynote aren't at all bad; Apple would need to add ODF support (I can't recall if iWork '06 did this), and they need to create a spreadsheet app.
While MS Access (ie. a database frontend) is nice, for 99% of home users, it's unnecessary and/or overkill. (I can't comment on business use of Access; I've really only had business experience in non-Microsoft environements..)
That makes a lot more sense.
Except, of course, that some of the worst sex offenders can be found in the clergy.
...
This statement can be true of any group.
* Some of the worst sex offenders are parents.
* Some of the worst sex offenders are school teachers.
* Some of the worst sex offenders are pastry chefs.
* Some of the worst sex offenders are kitten vivisection practitioners.
and so on...
You don't see/hear/read about many parents that are sex offenders; similarly unless there are previous convictions, you don't hear about the next-door neighbor being a sex offender. Such cases are (sadly) common and rarely considered newsworthy. If a teacher or clergyman is guilty... that's front-page stuff!
The bottom line is this: You hear about it when a teacher or priest is convicted of sex abuse -- becuase they are placed in positions of trust, and that trust was violated.
Like it or not, religion has an extrememly positive effect for many people. It isn't a universal/perfect solution (because there is none), but religion generally solves more of society's ills than it creates.
Where, exactly, did you get the idea that America has great environmental laws? Few Americans have such illusions...