Agreed. Single-window design isn't the solution. The solution is fixing the floating palettes so you don't have to click twice, and all the other UI abortions that GIMP is guilty of. If a single-window design is the only way to solve those problems, then that means X11 needs a fairly fundamental redesign.
If you believe GPL software is becoming obscure, you are living under a rock.
Well, let's look at the three most popular pieces of GPL software:
GCC: mass exodus away from it to LLVM/Clang.
GDB: mass exodus away from it to LLDB.
Samba: Apple switched to its own SMB server software, slashing Samba's user base almost overnight.
So far, it looks to me like the three flagship GPL products are rapidly becoming obscure, and most of the other GPL products out there were always relatively obscure. Pretty much the only widely known GPL app remaining is OpenOffice.org, and a commercial company backed most of its initial development, making it a pretty bad example of Free Software beating commercial software.
They will eventually fail, as pure GPL communities build better and more accurate products. This isn't theory, it's happening today. Look at pure GPLv3 projects like ZeroMQ.org. It has no competitors even close.
I rather suspect that it has no serious competition simply because IPC and distributed computing is inherently a niche market with only a couple of real players. Free Software and Open Source both do well in niche markets. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
Besides, you seem to be approaching the GPL issue strictly from the point of view of a corporation that wants to use it. How about the point of view of, oh say, the writers of that software? Presumably the writers chose the GPL because they wanted it to remain open. They saw it as a personal advantage to be able to have others improve on their software and give the improvements back to them in a virtuous circle.
I would argue that the same thing is true for Open Source folks. The only difference between the GPL and more liberal licenses in that regard is that the GPL requires others to give back their changes if they redistribute modified copies, whereas the BSD license just asks politely.
I pretty much agree with you on your other points, although AFAICT, the LGPLv3 is just as problematic as GPLv3 because of its patent stance. You can't fight software patents through software licenses. The only useful way to fight software patents is to massively abuse them openly and repeatedly against major pro-software-patent corporations in the most trollish ways possible until those corporations realize what an unholy mess they have created and demand real reform.
That's a critical distinction, and the corollary to that distinction is that most companies won't touch GPLv3 software with a ten meter pole, which means that it never gets included in commercial OS distributions and can't be sold/given away in many popular online stores. That, in turn, is a great reason not to use GPLv3 software.
First rule of software: if it's hard to obtain and/or hard to install, it might as well not exist, as it will be forever relegated to niche markets.
As a case in point, we're currently watching Apple, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD move towards LLVM/Clang. Assuming this transition continues unabated, within a few years, GCC will basically be a footnote outside of hardcore Free Software circles.
It's worth noting that none of the people or companies involved in that transition are doing it because they want to take away customers' rights. They're doing it because they have a different definition of "freedom" than GPL proponents. Freedom to take open source software and make it closed source is a freedom that the GPL takes away. Thus, the GPL is less free than BSD licenses. Sure, you can try to justify that fact away by saying that it prevents other people from taking away your freedom, but does it really?
If I took GCC and made it closed source today (assuming I were allowed to do so), existing GCC users would continue to have access to previous versions of GCC. They could continue to innovate and improve the compiler. They just wouldn't be entitled to the improvements that I made for my customers. Further, if I developed a compiler from scratch, my customers would have exactly the same rights to the compiler source as they would if I were allowed to take GCC closed source. Therefore, no one's freedom is actually taken away by taking an open source project and making it closed source. The only difference is that in one case, the GCC developers feel like I've taken advantage of their generosity and used it for personal gain, whereas in the other case, they don't.
Really, what it comes down to is entitlement. Free Software proponents feel that the community is entitled to free fixes from anyone who redistributes code that they gave away, whereas the Open Source community does not. The Free Software proponents (at least the ones who haven't been fooled by false claims that it protects "freedoms") see these post-backs as essentially a form of payment in exchange for their work. By continuing to make that payment, companies are allowed to benefit from the community's previous work on the project. In effect, Free Software developers use code post-backs as a form of currency, whereas traditional Open Source software developers just plain give away their code.
What's fascinating is that when you look at the history of software, a pattern emerges: companies value the right to take software closed-source even if they have no real intention of availing themselves of that right. GPL essentially deprives them of flexibility. The result is that given two otherwise equal choices, one of which is licensed under a GPL license and one of which is licensed under a BSD license, companies will invariably choose the latter. It's possibly an irrational reaction, but it's a consistent reaction.
The result of this, of course, is that companies distance themselves from GPLed software, making it harder and harder to obtain, relegating it to obscurity. By contrast, Open Source software, while not as ideologically pure in the eyes of GPL proponents, flourishes and, unsurprisingly, remains open more often than not.
That's not entirely true. In many years, it does have a higher percentage of its cases overturned than other circuits. Of course, one could also argue that this is because the 9th circuit is much, much larger. Thus, the SCOTUS hears several times as many cases from the 9th circuit, which means that the difference in overturn rate can be explained away by rounding error. If you overturn 18 out of 20 cases, you've overturned 90%; if you overturn 4 out of 5 cases, you've overturned 80%, and there's no way to reach 90% without jumping all the way to 100%....
They only have 100 Mbps outbound. As long as they have at least two standard phone lines to work with, they can route the data over the existing Cat 3 using 100BASE-T4, and they're done. No performance penalty is required. If they only have one Cat 3 wire to work with, they're pretty much screwed unless they pull new cables, as they'll have to wire it for 10BASE-T.
That said, if they're going to upgrade the wiring, they should go ahead and pull fiber. In the long run, they'll be glad they did.
True, but judging from the hotels I've stayed in over the years, I'd be willing to bet that few, if any of them did... well... any of that. They buy or lease some pre-built router box, toss in two or three access points per floor, all in bridging mode, cable it up with 100BASE-TX or maybe Gig-E, connect the other side to some sad DSL modem, or if you're really lucky, a T1, and call it a day.
To be fair, until the iPhone's success the iPad could not have succeeded.
True, but that doesn't mean that a different company couldn't have come up with the iPhone, which was my point. Whether somebody else's product would have been successful in the market or not isn't really relevant to whether the design itself was possible. Sure, there are some aspects of it that would have been different ten years earlier (e.g. extra buttons or on-screen controls to make up for the lack of multi-touch), but someone could have designed a device that physically looked very similar.
The game changer began with the consolidation of disparate devices such as cell phones, mp3 players, and camera's... the entire class of devices known as "Feature Phones"
Which happened the better part of a decade before Apple entered the market. My previous phone from 2001 or so could browse the web, could take pictures, and... well, no MP3 player quite yet, but those came within a year or two.
The game changer was Apple putting a decent UI on what had previously been a bunch of train wrecks, bringing feature phones to the consumer space. Either way, though, again, that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether someone could have built a device that looks physically like an iPhone ten years ago, i.e. a metal rim with a glass front and a plastic, glass, or metal back. The answer, very clearly, is yes. Instead, they made cheap plastic devices like the Palm Pilot and Handspring Visor because they were trying to build "cheap" instead of trying to build "good".
If you build "good", then "cheap" will come through economies of scale. If you build "cheap", then "good" will never come; economies of scale will always just make "cheap" cheaper in a never-ending race to the bottom.
Only if you extrapolate in a really stupid way by assuming that prices will drop by $X per gigabyte instead of assuming that prices will continue to drop by a certain percentage per year as I did.
Yes, my conclusions are a hell of a lot less flawed. They're certainly no guarantee of future performance, as new technology tends to be bursty and rather unpredictable, but they're at least a decent ballpark guess, which is more than you have offered.
Either way, it's pretty clear that SSD technology has more room for capacity growth per unit cost than magnetic storage. Therefore, it is almost inevitable that the cost per gigabyte for SSDs will drop below that of hard drives within the next couple of decades, give or take (unless some third, disruptive technology renders them both obsolete before that happens).
As far as I can tell from a number of searches on the subject, SSDs were mostly in the ballpark of $10 per gigabyte for most of 2008, +/- about $2.50 per gigabyte, with the cheapest drives falling to somewhere around $2.30 per gigabyte by year's end. They've never been anywhere close to $1 per gigabyte in terms of what the customer actually pays.
Maybe you're confusing true SSDs with USB flash drives? Or maybe you're confusing bare flash part prices with the price of the finished product?
If the GGP was implying that no one could have built something like the iPad prior to when Apple built it because of some manufacturing limitations, that's a pretty laughable assertion. Other than the thickness (and possibly the resolution), there's basically no part of the iPad's outward appearance that would not have been possible several years earlier. After all, the iPhone predated it by three years, and it was very similar in its outward design.
The reason other companies didn't build devices that looked like the iPhone and iPad is because the other vendors clung to the old way of thinking—to outdated and outmoded assumptions such as the belief that every phone needs a mechanical keyboard, that every tablet needs to be compatible with Windows applications, and so on. Those fundamentally wrong assumptions held back everyone else's design in this area far more than any technical limitations did.
Umm... we're talking about design patents here, so they're not supposed to require the invention of any tools or technology—so much so that if they have a functional purpose, they're prima facie invalid.
SSDs are at or around a dollar per gigabyte. That's only running about six years behind the price of hard drives. In those six years, hard drive prices have dropped by a factor of ten. In the past three years, solid state disks have dropped by more than a factor of twenty. Thus, SSDs are dropping in price more than four times as fast as hard drives. If we extrapolate that into the future, the current order of magnitude will go away in about seven or eight years without this added burden on hard drives.
More importantly, however, most users don't need a terabyte drive in their laptops. (I already have one, and most other folks don't need nearly that much capacity.) For most folks, the question is therefore not when the cost per GB gets low enough, but rather whether they can get something big enough for a hundred bucks or less. Adding ten bucks to the base price on hard drives brings them a lot closer to the base price for SSDs.
Finally, a bump of 10% in rotating media won't make them equal, but it is important to note that this is a fixed cost being added to the cost of hard drive manufacturing, independent of capacity. Thus, there will always be this artificial floor propping up the price—a floor that SSDs won't have.
And yet I never see people cursing out Intel/AMD or ATI/Nvidia on slashdot (and of course, now it's just three companies).
That's because outside of the PC space, Intel and ATI are irrelevant. Everything else is build with ARM, PowerPC, or occasionally MIPS these days. On the whole, as CPU manufacturers go, they're both niche players.
Also, Intel and ATI sell a product without any particular terms and conditions attached. If I want to take an Intel CPU and use it as a space heater instead of a CPU, I can do that. They won't warrant it, but I can do that. I can move it from machine to machine. I can overclock it. I can use it without paying Intel another dime. Try to take a cell phone and use it without paying one of those cell companies a monthly fee and see how well that works.
There's a big difference between a product and a service. A product can be replaced a lot more easily than a service.
And the problem with that is that Nixon (and others) should probably have been punished for many of the stunts he pulled, but cannot be because (ignoring the pardon for a moment) he died before people were able to extract enough information to pull a case together. Similarly, a solid black page with nothing more than a section number suggests that the government has something to hide that is sufficiently depraved that they have to cover it up. If that's the case, then the responsible parties should be tried and convicted, but they can't be if the truth is not known for twenty or thirty years.
Ultimately, if a reasonable amount of information cannot be obtained in a timely manner, then the government can no longer usefully be held responsible by the people. When corrupt government officials cease to fear the public, you can no longer have a government of, by, and for the people. Thus, if FOIA is the best tool we have for discovering information about egregious abuses like this, we need better tools. If we don't get them, it's only a matter of years or decades before our government degrades far enough that the public can be incited to open rebellion. I, for one, don't want to be living anywhere near this side of the world when that happens.... Then again, with our nuclear capacity, I think I would prefer to be living in Mars Colony when it happens....
Either way, a stronger FOIA is absolutely necessary for proper functioning of a free society. More specifically, in order to black out content under FOIA, someone should automatically have to appear before a judge and defend it, and it should be mandatory to disclose the nature of the material in question sufficient for an ordinary citizen to understand why it was necessary to black it out, and the content must disclose a declassification date that must be deemed reasonable by a judge. For example, "this was blacked out because it contains names, locations, and other information that could lead to the disclosure of an operative in another country. The reference to the content requested is tangential, and essentially states that a particular event could have been prevented if the technology in (b)(5) had been available to the party in question. This content will be declassified on December 31, 2016 unless extended due to continued covert operations in the region."
Corn is a major component of the food for high-fat beef. Raising the price of high-fat beef relative to other protein sources is arguably a good thing.
This is where you file a FOIA complaint and they get to sit there in front of a judge and explain why they deliberately attempted to evade a properly filed FOIA request with such a ridiculous response.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, FOIA has no teeth, i.e. there's no way to prosecute these clowns for even such flagrant abuse. However, if a judge forces the information to be released and it is legally actionable information, they could potentially be charged with obstruction.
It was kind of hard to do given that they used the term "jack" to mean "plug" and the term "port" to mean "jack" or "receptacle"....
BTW, has anyone ever actually seen an audio plug (other than the old telephone switchboard plugs from the early-to-mid-1900s) that contained any significant amount of ferrous metal? I'd be curious to know how someone could think that standard audio plugs can be held in place by a magnet. I'm assuming, based on the fact that the person who wrote this story got basic terminology wrong, that the author also misunderstood that aspect of the patent....
Thanks, but no thanks. For most people, the whole point of a headset on a phone is to move the transmitter farther away from one's head. Bluetooth just replaces the cell transmitter with a different transmitter.
First, the Titanic is too extreme an example because far too much of the ship was gone, and the ship could not possibly have been saved by any amount of bailing. The U.S. government isn't anywhere near being on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, so the analogy fails miserably.
Second, the captain of a chip certainly can't bail out the entire boat with a single soup ladle. However, the captain can scream at all the other occupants of the boat if they aren't doing their part, and if each person on the boat lifts a ladle, they can move a whole lot of water. In a similar way, the people at the top shouldn't be paying attention to the $500k budget items; the people at the bottom should be. The people at the bottom aren't; therefore, the people at the top should be paying attention to why the people at the bottom aren't paying attention. It's a systemic problem that can only be solved with a systemic solution.
One great way to effect a reduction in the federal budget would be to give managers and line-level employees bonuses for finding ways to cut costs. Another way to effect the desired reduction would be to provide a "rat out" line in which government employees could report wasteful spending to a watchdog group with the power to enact disciplinary action. Finally, you could go along way towards effecting budget cuts by disabusing managers of the notion that if their department reduces its operating costs, then that money will be removed from their department's budget in the following year (and by making commensurate policy changes as needed to ensure that such cuts do not happen).
This is half a million dollars we're talking about here, a drop in the bucket by government standards. It probably costs that much every time a fighter jet flies.
You could make any number of good arguments for this research, but that argument is complete crap. I can explain why with only a single sentence:
Trillion dollar budgets are made up of lots of smaller expenses.
The problem is, everybody thinks that their $5,000 or $50,000 or $500,000 expenditure is important. At some point, you have to judge the relative importance of all of those small expenses, or else you're never going to actually reduce government spending. Thus, the argument that the budget for any project is "a drop in the bucket" and therefore not worth worrying about is an inherently specious argument. Further, that sort of thinking is exactly why we have a budget problem in the first place.
Instead, you should argue that it would be far too easy to eradicate all human life on Earth through nuclear war, runaway global warming, some sort of germ warfare or catastrophic natural disease, launching too much garbage into the sun, etc. Therefore, the best bet for humanity's long-term survival is to get at least some of us off this rock at distances so vast that near-instantaneous travel from place to place is infeasible.
"Mock trial" is a term traditionally reserved for a mock jury trial; in concept, a "moot court" is similar, except that it is a non-jury trial, e.g. an appellate court or similar. I didn't think it was worth spelling it out in such detail....
In case you're being serious, this is one of those words whose British usage and U.S. usage has diverged somewhat over the last few hundred years.
In modern British usage, "moot" means that it is a debatable point.
In modern U.S. usage, "moot" means academic or unimportant. In (U.S.) legal parlance, "moot point" or "moot argument" means an argument that would have no bearing on anything even if argued successfully.
The reason for the usage drift is that the term "moot court" (both in U.S. and British English) is a concept similar to a "mock trial" held in academia. Thus, at least in the U.S., the term "moot point" evolved to mean a point that is arguable, but is only interesting academically and has no bearing upon the results of an actual trial.
Not that there's much point in pointing this out in a thread full of silliness....
Back on-topic, though, it's fascinating how one can have wiretapping without a wire. Next thing you know, we can have obstruction of justice without justice. Oh, wait.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Single-window design isn't the solution. The solution is fixing the floating palettes so you don't have to click twice, and all the other UI abortions that GIMP is guilty of. If a single-window design is the only way to solve those problems, then that means X11 needs a fairly fundamental redesign.
Well, let's look at the three most popular pieces of GPL software:
So far, it looks to me like the three flagship GPL products are rapidly becoming obscure, and most of the other GPL products out there were always relatively obscure. Pretty much the only widely known GPL app remaining is OpenOffice.org, and a commercial company backed most of its initial development, making it a pretty bad example of Free Software beating commercial software.
I rather suspect that it has no serious competition simply because IPC and distributed computing is inherently a niche market with only a couple of real players. Free Software and Open Source both do well in niche markets. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
I would argue that the same thing is true for Open Source folks. The only difference between the GPL and more liberal licenses in that regard is that the GPL requires others to give back their changes if they redistribute modified copies, whereas the BSD license just asks politely.
I pretty much agree with you on your other points, although AFAICT, the LGPLv3 is just as problematic as GPLv3 because of its patent stance. You can't fight software patents through software licenses. The only useful way to fight software patents is to massively abuse them openly and repeatedly against major pro-software-patent corporations in the most trollish ways possible until those corporations realize what an unholy mess they have created and demand real reform.
Kindergarten Cop reference. Nice.
That's a critical distinction, and the corollary to that distinction is that most companies won't touch GPLv3 software with a ten meter pole, which means that it never gets included in commercial OS distributions and can't be sold/given away in many popular online stores. That, in turn, is a great reason not to use GPLv3 software.
First rule of software: if it's hard to obtain and/or hard to install, it might as well not exist, as it will be forever relegated to niche markets.
As a case in point, we're currently watching Apple, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD move towards LLVM/Clang. Assuming this transition continues unabated, within a few years, GCC will basically be a footnote outside of hardcore Free Software circles.
It's worth noting that none of the people or companies involved in that transition are doing it because they want to take away customers' rights. They're doing it because they have a different definition of "freedom" than GPL proponents. Freedom to take open source software and make it closed source is a freedom that the GPL takes away. Thus, the GPL is less free than BSD licenses. Sure, you can try to justify that fact away by saying that it prevents other people from taking away your freedom, but does it really?
If I took GCC and made it closed source today (assuming I were allowed to do so), existing GCC users would continue to have access to previous versions of GCC. They could continue to innovate and improve the compiler. They just wouldn't be entitled to the improvements that I made for my customers. Further, if I developed a compiler from scratch, my customers would have exactly the same rights to the compiler source as they would if I were allowed to take GCC closed source. Therefore, no one's freedom is actually taken away by taking an open source project and making it closed source. The only difference is that in one case, the GCC developers feel like I've taken advantage of their generosity and used it for personal gain, whereas in the other case, they don't.
Really, what it comes down to is entitlement. Free Software proponents feel that the community is entitled to free fixes from anyone who redistributes code that they gave away, whereas the Open Source community does not. The Free Software proponents (at least the ones who haven't been fooled by false claims that it protects "freedoms") see these post-backs as essentially a form of payment in exchange for their work. By continuing to make that payment, companies are allowed to benefit from the community's previous work on the project. In effect, Free Software developers use code post-backs as a form of currency, whereas traditional Open Source software developers just plain give away their code.
What's fascinating is that when you look at the history of software, a pattern emerges: companies value the right to take software closed-source even if they have no real intention of availing themselves of that right. GPL essentially deprives them of flexibility. The result is that given two otherwise equal choices, one of which is licensed under a GPL license and one of which is licensed under a BSD license, companies will invariably choose the latter. It's possibly an irrational reaction, but it's a consistent reaction.
The result of this, of course, is that companies distance themselves from GPLed software, making it harder and harder to obtain, relegating it to obscurity. By contrast, Open Source software, while not as ideologically pure in the eyes of GPL proponents, flourishes and, unsurprisingly, remains open more often than not.
That's not entirely true. In many years, it does have a higher percentage of its cases overturned than other circuits. Of course, one could also argue that this is because the 9th circuit is much, much larger. Thus, the SCOTUS hears several times as many cases from the 9th circuit, which means that the difference in overturn rate can be explained away by rounding error. If you overturn 18 out of 20 cases, you've overturned 90%; if you overturn 4 out of 5 cases, you've overturned 80%, and there's no way to reach 90% without jumping all the way to 100%....
They only have 100 Mbps outbound. As long as they have at least two standard phone lines to work with, they can route the data over the existing Cat 3 using 100BASE-T4, and they're done. No performance penalty is required. If they only have one Cat 3 wire to work with, they're pretty much screwed unless they pull new cables, as they'll have to wire it for 10BASE-T.
That said, if they're going to upgrade the wiring, they should go ahead and pull fiber. In the long run, they'll be glad they did.
True, but judging from the hotels I've stayed in over the years, I'd be willing to bet that few, if any of them did... well... any of that. They buy or lease some pre-built router box, toss in two or three access points per floor, all in bridging mode, cable it up with 100BASE-TX or maybe Gig-E, connect the other side to some sad DSL modem, or if you're really lucky, a T1, and call it a day.
True, but that doesn't mean that a different company couldn't have come up with the iPhone, which was my point. Whether somebody else's product would have been successful in the market or not isn't really relevant to whether the design itself was possible. Sure, there are some aspects of it that would have been different ten years earlier (e.g. extra buttons or on-screen controls to make up for the lack of multi-touch), but someone could have designed a device that physically looked very similar.
Which happened the better part of a decade before Apple entered the market. My previous phone from 2001 or so could browse the web, could take pictures, and... well, no MP3 player quite yet, but those came within a year or two.
The game changer was Apple putting a decent UI on what had previously been a bunch of train wrecks, bringing feature phones to the consumer space. Either way, though, again, that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether someone could have built a device that looks physically like an iPhone ten years ago, i.e. a metal rim with a glass front and a plastic, glass, or metal back. The answer, very clearly, is yes. Instead, they made cheap plastic devices like the Palm Pilot and Handspring Visor because they were trying to build "cheap" instead of trying to build "good".
If you build "good", then "cheap" will come through economies of scale. If you build "cheap", then "good" will never come; economies of scale will always just make "cheap" cheaper in a never-ending race to the bottom.
Only if you extrapolate in a really stupid way by assuming that prices will drop by $X per gigabyte instead of assuming that prices will continue to drop by a certain percentage per year as I did.
Yes, my conclusions are a hell of a lot less flawed. They're certainly no guarantee of future performance, as new technology tends to be bursty and rather unpredictable, but they're at least a decent ballpark guess, which is more than you have offered.
Either way, it's pretty clear that SSD technology has more room for capacity growth per unit cost than magnetic storage. Therefore, it is almost inevitable that the cost per gigabyte for SSDs will drop below that of hard drives within the next couple of decades, give or take (unless some third, disruptive technology renders them both obsolete before that happens).
As far as I can tell from a number of searches on the subject, SSDs were mostly in the ballpark of $10 per gigabyte for most of 2008, +/- about $2.50 per gigabyte, with the cheapest drives falling to somewhere around $2.30 per gigabyte by year's end. They've never been anywhere close to $1 per gigabyte in terms of what the customer actually pays.
Maybe you're confusing true SSDs with USB flash drives? Or maybe you're confusing bare flash part prices with the price of the finished product?
If the GGP was implying that no one could have built something like the iPad prior to when Apple built it because of some manufacturing limitations, that's a pretty laughable assertion. Other than the thickness (and possibly the resolution), there's basically no part of the iPad's outward appearance that would not have been possible several years earlier. After all, the iPhone predated it by three years, and it was very similar in its outward design.
The reason other companies didn't build devices that looked like the iPhone and iPad is because the other vendors clung to the old way of thinking—to outdated and outmoded assumptions such as the belief that every phone needs a mechanical keyboard, that every tablet needs to be compatible with Windows applications, and so on. Those fundamentally wrong assumptions held back everyone else's design in this area far more than any technical limitations did.
Umm... we're talking about design patents here, so they're not supposed to require the invention of any tools or technology—so much so that if they have a functional purpose, they're prima facie invalid.
SSDs are at or around a dollar per gigabyte. That's only running about six years behind the price of hard drives. In those six years, hard drive prices have dropped by a factor of ten. In the past three years, solid state disks have dropped by more than a factor of twenty. Thus, SSDs are dropping in price more than four times as fast as hard drives. If we extrapolate that into the future, the current order of magnitude will go away in about seven or eight years without this added burden on hard drives.
More importantly, however, most users don't need a terabyte drive in their laptops. (I already have one, and most other folks don't need nearly that much capacity.) For most folks, the question is therefore not when the cost per GB gets low enough, but rather whether they can get something big enough for a hundred bucks or less. Adding ten bucks to the base price on hard drives brings them a lot closer to the base price for SSDs.
Finally, a bump of 10% in rotating media won't make them equal, but it is important to note that this is a fixed cost being added to the cost of hard drive manufacturing, independent of capacity. Thus, there will always be this artificial floor propping up the price—a floor that SSDs won't have.
Err... Intel and AMD.
That's because outside of the PC space, Intel and ATI are irrelevant. Everything else is build with ARM, PowerPC, or occasionally MIPS these days. On the whole, as CPU manufacturers go, they're both niche players.
Also, Intel and ATI sell a product without any particular terms and conditions attached. If I want to take an Intel CPU and use it as a space heater instead of a CPU, I can do that. They won't warrant it, but I can do that. I can move it from machine to machine. I can overclock it. I can use it without paying Intel another dime. Try to take a cell phone and use it without paying one of those cell companies a monthly fee and see how well that works.
There's a big difference between a product and a service. A product can be replaced a lot more easily than a service.
And the problem with that is that Nixon (and others) should probably have been punished for many of the stunts he pulled, but cannot be because (ignoring the pardon for a moment) he died before people were able to extract enough information to pull a case together. Similarly, a solid black page with nothing more than a section number suggests that the government has something to hide that is sufficiently depraved that they have to cover it up. If that's the case, then the responsible parties should be tried and convicted, but they can't be if the truth is not known for twenty or thirty years.
Ultimately, if a reasonable amount of information cannot be obtained in a timely manner, then the government can no longer usefully be held responsible by the people. When corrupt government officials cease to fear the public, you can no longer have a government of, by, and for the people. Thus, if FOIA is the best tool we have for discovering information about egregious abuses like this, we need better tools. If we don't get them, it's only a matter of years or decades before our government degrades far enough that the public can be incited to open rebellion. I, for one, don't want to be living anywhere near this side of the world when that happens.... Then again, with our nuclear capacity, I think I would prefer to be living in Mars Colony when it happens....
Either way, a stronger FOIA is absolutely necessary for proper functioning of a free society. More specifically, in order to black out content under FOIA, someone should automatically have to appear before a judge and defend it, and it should be mandatory to disclose the nature of the material in question sufficient for an ordinary citizen to understand why it was necessary to black it out, and the content must disclose a declassification date that must be deemed reasonable by a judge. For example, "this was blacked out because it contains names, locations, and other information that could lead to the disclosure of an operative in another country. The reference to the content requested is tangential, and essentially states that a particular event could have been prevented if the technology in (b)(5) had been available to the party in question. This content will be declassified on December 31, 2016 unless extended due to continued covert operations in the region."
Corn is a major component of the food for high-fat beef. Raising the price of high-fat beef relative to other protein sources is arguably a good thing.
This is where you file a FOIA complaint and they get to sit there in front of a judge and explain why they deliberately attempted to evade a properly filed FOIA request with such a ridiculous response.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, FOIA has no teeth, i.e. there's no way to prosecute these clowns for even such flagrant abuse. However, if a judge forces the information to be released and it is legally actionable information, they could potentially be charged with obstruction.
It was kind of hard to do given that they used the term "jack" to mean "plug" and the term "port" to mean "jack" or "receptacle"....
BTW, has anyone ever actually seen an audio plug (other than the old telephone switchboard plugs from the early-to-mid-1900s) that contained any significant amount of ferrous metal? I'd be curious to know how someone could think that standard audio plugs can be held in place by a magnet. I'm assuming, based on the fact that the person who wrote this story got basic terminology wrong, that the author also misunderstood that aspect of the patent....
Thanks, but no thanks. For most people, the whole point of a headset on a phone is to move the transmitter farther away from one's head. Bluetooth just replaces the cell transmitter with a different transmitter.
It's also a terrible analogy for two reasons:
First, the Titanic is too extreme an example because far too much of the ship was gone, and the ship could not possibly have been saved by any amount of bailing. The U.S. government isn't anywhere near being on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, so the analogy fails miserably.
Second, the captain of a chip certainly can't bail out the entire boat with a single soup ladle. However, the captain can scream at all the other occupants of the boat if they aren't doing their part, and if each person on the boat lifts a ladle, they can move a whole lot of water. In a similar way, the people at the top shouldn't be paying attention to the $500k budget items; the people at the bottom should be. The people at the bottom aren't; therefore, the people at the top should be paying attention to why the people at the bottom aren't paying attention. It's a systemic problem that can only be solved with a systemic solution.
One great way to effect a reduction in the federal budget would be to give managers and line-level employees bonuses for finding ways to cut costs. Another way to effect the desired reduction would be to provide a "rat out" line in which government employees could report wasteful spending to a watchdog group with the power to enact disciplinary action. Finally, you could go along way towards effecting budget cuts by disabusing managers of the notion that if their department reduces its operating costs, then that money will be removed from their department's budget in the following year (and by making commensurate policy changes as needed to ensure that such cuts do not happen).
You could make any number of good arguments for this research, but that argument is complete crap. I can explain why with only a single sentence:
Trillion dollar budgets are made up of lots of smaller expenses.
The problem is, everybody thinks that their $5,000 or $50,000 or $500,000 expenditure is important. At some point, you have to judge the relative importance of all of those small expenses, or else you're never going to actually reduce government spending. Thus, the argument that the budget for any project is "a drop in the bucket" and therefore not worth worrying about is an inherently specious argument. Further, that sort of thinking is exactly why we have a budget problem in the first place.
Instead, you should argue that it would be far too easy to eradicate all human life on Earth through nuclear war, runaway global warming, some sort of germ warfare or catastrophic natural disease, launching too much garbage into the sun, etc. Therefore, the best bet for humanity's long-term survival is to get at least some of us off this rock at distances so vast that near-instantaneous travel from place to place is infeasible.
"Mock trial" is a term traditionally reserved for a mock jury trial; in concept, a "moot court" is similar, except that it is a non-jury trial, e.g. an appellate court or similar. I didn't think it was worth spelling it out in such detail....
In case you're being serious, this is one of those words whose British usage and U.S. usage has diverged somewhat over the last few hundred years.
In modern British usage, "moot" means that it is a debatable point.
In modern U.S. usage, "moot" means academic or unimportant. In (U.S.) legal parlance, "moot point" or "moot argument" means an argument that would have no bearing on anything even if argued successfully.
The reason for the usage drift is that the term "moot court" (both in U.S. and British English) is a concept similar to a "mock trial" held in academia. Thus, at least in the U.S., the term "moot point" evolved to mean a point that is arguable, but is only interesting academically and has no bearing upon the results of an actual trial.
Not that there's much point in pointing this out in a thread full of silliness....
Back on-topic, though, it's fascinating how one can have wiretapping without a wire. Next thing you know, we can have obstruction of justice without justice. Oh, wait.