I think it would probably be more of an issue if the governments of the allies in question - like the UK for instance - weren't also spying on everything they can and exchanging onformation with each other.
Because USA's allies are spying on their own citizens and USA has access to this info is even more reason for the rest of us to fear the USA. Case in point Maher Arar.
(for those of you not from Canada here's Arar's story in short - Canadian government was watching one there own citizens without any real cause; not knowing he was being watched he booked a flight that included switching planes in the USA; when he landed in the USA he was arrested because US officials knew that the Canadian government was watching him, and he was sent off to a secret prison where he was tortued for 10 months)
Nintendo arguably started the "my controller has more buttons than your controller" trend with the SNES's 12 buttons, but what's done is done.
Considering that two gens before SNES, Intellivision and Colleco both had more than 12 buttons, I find it hard to credit Nintendo for this one. If anything Nintendo delayed the trend by introduding the NES with so few.
A 1% failure rate indicates a very poorly designed product, poorly executed, and with awful quality control processes
On the one hand, you are absolutely correct, but on the other hand, you clearly have no knowledge of the consumer electronic industry. It is pretty much standard pratice industry wide to give little or no QA on most electronics (it turns on? ship it). Basically companies have discovered that it is cheaper to let customers be their QA (I guess paying shipping is cheaper than hiring people; plus the added benefit that some customers will just give up and accept whatever the flaw is).
I think it goes without saying that all the companies doing this either don't know or don't care what it does to their brand image (then again, I remember when I used to work for one of these companies reassuring a co-worker that for ever customer that swore off our products there were plenty more who'd just sworn off our competitors)
So to sum up, yeah it sucks that this is how it is, but for many products you can't buy an alternative that has been QAed. (and with the way the world is, the only reason I think that all the other industries you mentioned tend to be good nearly all the time while electronics aren't is that the courts have largely let electronic manufacturers off the hook so long as they have a reasonable return policy, while say food producers shipping 3% rotten food would be in for a world of hurt in court)
what if newspapers split columns across 7 different pages and made you wait 20 seconds before you were allowed to turn the page?
I hate it when newspapers split articles up (obviously they never do as badly as you say, I'm just talking about what is the industry norm). Obviously really long articles need to be split, and I have some sympathy for their efforts to cram as much as possible on to the front page, but there are some papers I used to read that might have twenty articles or more split up over the course of the paper. The ones that frustrate me most are the ones where you are flipping to some far off other page just to read one more paragraph; the flow of the article is wrecked by the time spent searching for the end of it, and the flow of the paper is wrecked by first skipping forward, then skipping back.
I am not a newspaper editor, but very often I can see what seem to be simple solutions to this layout chaos, so my only possible conclusion is that some newspaper editors hate their readers.
Otherwise Windows and Mac OS have to compete with these new features AS WELL AS Linux's price ($0.00).
I think what may be holding Linux back more than anything is the belief in the community that its price is huge advantage - its not. There are two ways you can get an OS, pre-installed from an OEM or on some media for you to install yourself.
If you are buy Windows from most OEMs, it is free. Its not kinda of free or a hidden cost, it is free; the entire fee that MS charges OEMs is covered by all the advertisements (aka trial software) that come with it. (you may recall a couple of years ago a discussion on Slashdot about how Dell charged more for a system with no OS than one with Windows) So in this case there is no advantage at all for Linux.
On the other hand, for people installing the OS on their own (or getting someone else to do it for them) Linux has to deal with two huge issues. The first is the stigma many people attach to things that are free; we live in a society that has largely become jaded to anything that is free because the promise of something for nothing is often the hallmark of a conman. The second issue is that even those people who have no problem with getting their OS for free often have avenues through which they can get windows for free.
So to sum up, the GP was right, Linux will have its big break through when it is seen by the general public as being better than Windows in its own right; its price hasn't won it much to date, and likely won't in the future either.
as opposed to insulin, which is no longer patented (if it ever was).
My understanding is that Banting refused large sums of money to buy the patent off of him, fearing that allowing one company to hold the patent would result in gouging and limit the people helped by it; instead he sold it to the University of Toronto for one dollar. So yes it was patented, but the holder of the patent only used it to make sure that no one company controlled its production.
Why bother developing for the PS3 is they'll sell on the PS2 still?
I was originally going to agree with you, pointing out that for a game company there are six platforms I would look at before choosing to invest in make a game for the PS3(PS2, DS, PSP, Wii, Xbox360, PC). However, then I stopped and looked at this from another angle.
If you are Sony, the last thing you want is for game companys to be weighing making a game for the PS2 vs the PS3; its cheaper to make a game for the PS2, and prior to this announcement when you developed a game for the PS2, you had all PS3 owners as potential buyers of your game; its entirely possible that part of the problem with the PS3 library has been caused by continued development for the PS2.
Sony may well be breaking BC in hopes that developers will shift from making PS2 games to PS3, thus stengthening the PS3 library.
I am not trying to troll here, I really am confused about this; please correct me if you have actually answers.
My understanding is that we discovered the ozone hole in the Antarctic immediately after we started to measure south polar ozone. That is to say, we have no measurements that predate the hole.
Is this the case? If is it, then why are we sure that humans have caused it (as opposed to it just being a natural part of the earth's atmosphere)?
New management. I don't know what you're complaining about. You signed it without duress, and initialed the clause indicating you'd read and understood it.
Sounds like several rental agreements I've had over the years. When moving in I ask the landlord to make note of a dozen or more minor flaws with the apartment. The landlord either outright refuses (saying, we would never ding you for something that small), or says they'll do it but doesn't, then when I am trying to get my damage deposit back years later and am now dealing with a different person I lose most or all of the deposit because there is no documentation that says these little problems pre-date me.
How many units of the NES did Nintendo sell at that price, anyway?
Wiki says 60 million. Of course, there's more to it than that.
First of all, the NES had a three year head start over other third gen systems. Nintendo didn't have to worry about price comparisons because there were no other systems.
Second, in the 80s many things are now in almost every home were much less common (like PCs, like internet connections, like cable tv, like cell phones, like big screen tvs) allowing people to who wanted a game system to spend a greater relative amount on it.
So, as others have pointed out, the PS3 and NES really are apples and oranges.
Something is either unique or it isn't.
There's no "Somewhat unique", or "very unique".
My mother was an English teacher and she used to complain about people misusing the word unique in this way all the time. And while I certainly understand the point you and she are making, I have long wondered at what point does a commonly misused word simply become redefined?
You can argue that "very unique" is non-sensical, but the truth is that everyone reading that phrase knows the intention of the author, and therefore information information is being conveyed.
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
Its amusing to hear people spout this line and then hear them decry America's inaction in Dafur. Which is it people? Do we meddle or not? Because at the moment we're going to be lambasted no matter what we do.
Try Googling these two phrases lifted from your comment "America's inaction in Darfur" and "US government just stops meddling in the affairs of other nations". The first page of each I think is very telling. One is full of American websites, the other is full of foreign websites.
I think this is representative of who you are hearing - two different groups, one composed of Americans and the other composed of the peoples you are meddling with.
(before someone rips into me, I am not expressing any opinion about Darfur, just pointing out that probably the people screaming the loudest for American action in Darfur are Americans. I know that here in Canada I have never heard anyone suggest it is an American problem; every person who brings it up wants the Canadian government to take action)
I'm sick of calling Dell, etc. and getting an "engrish is my 3rd language" call center representative. If they way to increase the cost of outsourcing, thereby decreasing feasibility, works for me.
Many larger companies (and I can say with certainty that Dell is amoungst these) have higher tiered warranties that you can purchase which guarentee support from an English speaking country.
But the reality is that most consumers only care about what language tech support speaks when they have to call them, and aren't willing to shell out the extra bucks at the time of purchase. In general, society rewards tech companies that keep prices low, regardless of how they do it. So it should be no surprise that tech companies cut every corner they can get away with.
In fairness to those questioning my statement on taxes, I can't find what would be the definative number - the total taxes collected in each country by all levels of government (which could then easily be divided by the population). However, from wiki here are some numbers
US
Fed Income taxes max at 35%, State at 9.3%
sales tax is typically 8.5%
Corp Income taxes max at 35%
Canada
Fed Income taxes max at 29%, Provincial at 17.95%
sales tax is typically 13%
Corp Income taxes are 36%
If we didn't have medicare already in Canada, it would be impossible for us to introduce it also.
Why?
For the all the same reasons the US has such trouble; corporate interests, tax payer resistence, and the difficulty of introducing a new bureacracy that needs to be so much more complex that the one that was needed when we acutally did introduce medicare.
But that's not a reason why socialized medicine is bad
Never said it was. Just said that its a reason that outsiders should be sympathetic to US citizens for their plight; they didn't get unversal healthcare when getting it would have been so much easier, and because of that they might never get it.
It's funny how you claim that public health care will bankrupt your country. We've had this system for decades, and the Canadian government has been well into the black for the past few years, and we're running a trade surplus.
In fairness to the people you are bashing; the U.S. has way lower taxes than we do and it would be political suicide in the US to increase taxes to Canadian levels.
Its also worth noting that countries that have universal healthcare established it long before many of the procedures that make it so expensive today were conceived of. If we didn't have medicare already in Canada, it would be impossible for us to introduce it also.
And when ridiculing the U.S. you need to keep in mind the enormous amount of money private companies have at stake. Any universal healthcare introduced in the US that involved squeezing out the insurance companies, would be met with a resistence I cannot even imagine. $776 Billion was paid to private medical insurance companies in the US last year; to protect that kind of money I suspect anything and everything would be done.
There is no payment scheme which cannot be abused by both the employer and the employee, so forcing employers to use a different scheme will not make those who have abused their employees stop; it will just change the way they abuse.
Just to make up a relevent example, a software company who has previously been forcing 80 hour weeks on programmers during crunch time might, in the face of this law, hire twice as many programmers, but give them all very few hours except during crunch time. So now instead of being over worked, they are under paid.
Then they are free to pay for the hosting, bandwidth and UI design themselves and not have to outsource it to anyone else in the future.
I suspect there is far more to it than cost; his company, as a member of the RIAA, has been and continues to tell people that the internet is evil and will eventually kill the music industry. Right now they are pretending that Apple somehow forced them to sign contracts (which is silly enough), but how on earth could this cherade continue if an RIAA member actually opened up an online store?
Adjusted for inflation it's within $50 of the PS2 launch price in Canada
Wow, I didn't believe you so I looked it up. And if you are comparing the cheap PS3 to the PS2, you are correct. According to Wiki the lauch price of the PS2 in Canada was $449.99 compared to $549.99 for the PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
Because USA's allies are spying on their own citizens and USA has access to this info is even more reason for the rest of us to fear the USA. Case in point Maher Arar.
(for those of you not from Canada here's Arar's story in short - Canadian government was watching one there own citizens without any real cause; not knowing he was being watched he booked a flight that included switching planes in the USA; when he landed in the USA he was arrested because US officials knew that the Canadian government was watching him, and he was sent off to a secret prison where he was tortued for 10 months)
Yeah I hate it when inaccurate information is taken off of websites to prevent confusion.
Considering that two gens before SNES, Intellivision and Colleco both had more than 12 buttons, I find it hard to credit Nintendo for this one. If anything Nintendo delayed the trend by introduding the NES with so few.
On the one hand, you are absolutely correct, but on the other hand, you clearly have no knowledge of the consumer electronic industry. It is pretty much standard pratice industry wide to give little or no QA on most electronics (it turns on? ship it). Basically companies have discovered that it is cheaper to let customers be their QA (I guess paying shipping is cheaper than hiring people; plus the added benefit that some customers will just give up and accept whatever the flaw is).
I think it goes without saying that all the companies doing this either don't know or don't care what it does to their brand image (then again, I remember when I used to work for one of these companies reassuring a co-worker that for ever customer that swore off our products there were plenty more who'd just sworn off our competitors)
So to sum up, yeah it sucks that this is how it is, but for many products you can't buy an alternative that has been QAed. (and with the way the world is, the only reason I think that all the other industries you mentioned tend to be good nearly all the time while electronics aren't is that the courts have largely let electronic manufacturers off the hook so long as they have a reasonable return policy, while say food producers shipping 3% rotten food would be in for a world of hurt in court)
I hate it when newspapers split articles up (obviously they never do as badly as you say, I'm just talking about what is the industry norm). Obviously really long articles need to be split, and I have some sympathy for their efforts to cram as much as possible on to the front page, but there are some papers I used to read that might have twenty articles or more split up over the course of the paper. The ones that frustrate me most are the ones where you are flipping to some far off other page just to read one more paragraph; the flow of the article is wrecked by the time spent searching for the end of it, and the flow of the paper is wrecked by first skipping forward, then skipping back.
I am not a newspaper editor, but very often I can see what seem to be simple solutions to this layout chaos, so my only possible conclusion is that some newspaper editors hate their readers.
I think what may be holding Linux back more than anything is the belief in the community that its price is huge advantage - its not. There are two ways you can get an OS, pre-installed from an OEM or on some media for you to install yourself.
If you are buy Windows from most OEMs, it is free. Its not kinda of free or a hidden cost, it is free; the entire fee that MS charges OEMs is covered by all the advertisements (aka trial software) that come with it. (you may recall a couple of years ago a discussion on Slashdot about how Dell charged more for a system with no OS than one with Windows) So in this case there is no advantage at all for Linux.
On the other hand, for people installing the OS on their own (or getting someone else to do it for them) Linux has to deal with two huge issues. The first is the stigma many people attach to things that are free; we live in a society that has largely become jaded to anything that is free because the promise of something for nothing is often the hallmark of a conman. The second issue is that even those people who have no problem with getting their OS for free often have avenues through which they can get windows for free.
So to sum up, the GP was right, Linux will have its big break through when it is seen by the general public as being better than Windows in its own right; its price hasn't won it much to date, and likely won't in the future either.
My understanding is that Banting refused large sums of money to buy the patent off of him, fearing that allowing one company to hold the patent would result in gouging and limit the people helped by it; instead he sold it to the University of Toronto for one dollar. So yes it was patented, but the holder of the patent only used it to make sure that no one company controlled its production.
I was originally going to agree with you, pointing out that for a game company there are six platforms I would look at before choosing to invest in make a game for the PS3(PS2, DS, PSP, Wii, Xbox360, PC). However, then I stopped and looked at this from another angle.
If you are Sony, the last thing you want is for game companys to be weighing making a game for the PS2 vs the PS3; its cheaper to make a game for the PS2, and prior to this announcement when you developed a game for the PS2, you had all PS3 owners as potential buyers of your game; its entirely possible that part of the problem with the PS3 library has been caused by continued development for the PS2.
Sony may well be breaking BC in hopes that developers will shift from making PS2 games to PS3, thus stengthening the PS3 library.
I am not trying to troll here, I really am confused about this; please correct me if you have actually answers.
My understanding is that we discovered the ozone hole in the Antarctic immediately after we started to measure south polar ozone. That is to say, we have no measurements that predate the hole.
Is this the case? If is it, then why are we sure that humans have caused it (as opposed to it just being a natural part of the earth's atmosphere)?
You might say they are aiming for a Confusopoly.
Sounds like several rental agreements I've had over the years. When moving in I ask the landlord to make note of a dozen or more minor flaws with the apartment. The landlord either outright refuses (saying, we would never ding you for something that small), or says they'll do it but doesn't, then when I am trying to get my damage deposit back years later and am now dealing with a different person I lose most or all of the deposit because there is no documentation that says these little problems pre-date me.
Wiki says 60 million. Of course, there's more to it than that.
First of all, the NES had a three year head start over other third gen systems. Nintendo didn't have to worry about price comparisons because there were no other systems.
Second, in the 80s many things are now in almost every home were much less common (like PCs, like internet connections, like cable tv, like cell phones, like big screen tvs) allowing people to who wanted a game system to spend a greater relative amount on it.
So, as others have pointed out, the PS3 and NES really are apples and oranges.
My mother was an English teacher and she used to complain about people misusing the word unique in this way all the time. And while I certainly understand the point you and she are making, I have long wondered at what point does a commonly misused word simply become redefined?
You can argue that "very unique" is non-sensical, but the truth is that everyone reading that phrase knows the intention of the author, and therefore information information is being conveyed.
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
Try Googling these two phrases lifted from your comment "America's inaction in Darfur" and "US government just stops meddling in the affairs of other nations". The first page of each I think is very telling. One is full of American websites, the other is full of foreign websites.
I think this is representative of who you are hearing - two different groups, one composed of Americans and the other composed of the peoples you are meddling with.
(before someone rips into me, I am not expressing any opinion about Darfur, just pointing out that probably the people screaming the loudest for American action in Darfur are Americans. I know that here in Canada I have never heard anyone suggest it is an American problem; every person who brings it up wants the Canadian government to take action)
Many larger companies (and I can say with certainty that Dell is amoungst these) have higher tiered warranties that you can purchase which guarentee support from an English speaking country.
But the reality is that most consumers only care about what language tech support speaks when they have to call them, and aren't willing to shell out the extra bucks at the time of purchase. In general, society rewards tech companies that keep prices low, regardless of how they do it. So it should be no surprise that tech companies cut every corner they can get away with.
Eventually yes, but if you look at the first season of TNG and even part of the second it is little more than a rehash of the original series.
Its not the agents that are expensive, its the mathematicians
In fairness to those questioning my statement on taxes, I can't find what would be the definative number - the total taxes collected in each country by all levels of government (which could then easily be divided by the population). However, from wiki here are some numbers
US
Canada
- Fed Income taxes max at 29%, Provincial at 17.95%
- sales tax is typically 13%
- Corp Income taxes are 36%
If we didn't have medicare already in Canada, it would be impossible for us to introduce it also. Why?For the all the same reasons the US has such trouble; corporate interests, tax payer resistence, and the difficulty of introducing a new bureacracy that needs to be so much more complex that the one that was needed when we acutally did introduce medicare.
But that's not a reason why socialized medicine is badNever said it was. Just said that its a reason that outsiders should be sympathetic to US citizens for their plight; they didn't get unversal healthcare when getting it would have been so much easier, and because of that they might never get it.
In fairness to the people you are bashing; the U.S. has way lower taxes than we do and it would be political suicide in the US to increase taxes to Canadian levels.
Its also worth noting that countries that have universal healthcare established it long before many of the procedures that make it so expensive today were conceived of. If we didn't have medicare already in Canada, it would be impossible for us to introduce it also.
And when ridiculing the U.S. you need to keep in mind the enormous amount of money private companies have at stake. Any universal healthcare introduced in the US that involved squeezing out the insurance companies, would be met with a resistence I cannot even imagine. $776 Billion was paid to private medical insurance companies in the US last year; to protect that kind of money I suspect anything and everything would be done.
I think you are seriously under estimating geekdom if you think that writing a letter in elf/orc/dwarf is going to hold back many mmo players.
Isn't that how the iphone came about?
There is no payment scheme which cannot be abused by both the employer and the employee, so forcing employers to use a different scheme will not make those who have abused their employees stop; it will just change the way they abuse.
Just to make up a relevent example, a software company who has previously been forcing 80 hour weeks on programmers during crunch time might, in the face of this law, hire twice as many programmers, but give them all very few hours except during crunch time. So now instead of being over worked, they are under paid.
I suspect there is far more to it than cost; his company, as a member of the RIAA, has been and continues to tell people that the internet is evil and will eventually kill the music industry. Right now they are pretending that Apple somehow forced them to sign contracts (which is silly enough), but how on earth could this cherade continue if an RIAA member actually opened up an online store?
Wow, I didn't believe you so I looked it up. And if you are comparing the cheap PS3 to the PS2, you are correct. According to Wiki the lauch price of the PS2 in Canada was $449.99 compared to $549.99 for the PS3.