Manufacturers are people; as such, they have rights.
Legally, yes, they are "people". They aren't, though; they don't have the same rights. They don't have the right to vote, have much more restricted freedom of speech, have significantly different rights when it comes to contract disputes with individuals (because of the presumption that the are a much stronger party), etc. It's a pretty big stsretch to call a manufacturer a person in any reasonable sense of the word.
But unless the House page discussing the bill is failing to mention something fairly fundamental, this bill doesn't do that. The bill wouldn't affect end users. It doesn't take away the user's right to modify a phone to not make a sound. It mandates that the phone, as shipped from the manufacturer, must do so and must not provide a way to turn it off. I'm not sure why the blogger thought that this allows prosecution of individuals. This bill could not prevent possession of cameras that don't beep even if it wanted to, as doing so would criminalize the possession of (and thus completely obliterate the resale value of) nearly every cellular phone built to date. If you want to ensure you never get elected to another public office as long as you live, pass a law that makes every one of your constituents replace his/her cell phone under penalty of incarceration....:-)
Even still, this bill is beyond idiotic for so many reasons, it's hard to know where to begin. I'll take a shot, though.
It now becomes unacceptable to take ANY digital photographs in concerts, weddings, etc. even without a flash because suddenly it disturbs everyone in the audience.
It does not affect video cameras, nor camera phones when used to record movies. I'd go so far as to say that 100% of the people this law is trying to prevent do NOT take still pictures, and therefore this law will do precisely NOTHING to prevent what they're trying to prevent! Ever try to take a picture with any kind of still camera in secret (much less a camera phone)? It's really hard. But a video camera? Trivial. You start it recording (a minute before you encounter the person you're stalking), attach it to your shoe or whatever, and... you get the idea. Want stills? Use a high definition camera and take a still frame from it. Just shy of 1MP, which is good enough for most purposes unless you need to digitally zoom in further because of distance. And before you say "it could make a continuous sound while shooting video", that would make the video feature completely and totally useless.
It adds additional complexity to cameras, resulting in larger shutter lag. Shutter lag on cheap digital cameras is already so slow that the cameras border on unusable. Add an extra fraction of a second to play that sound, and... you get the idea. If you wait until after the picture is taken, you're increasing the inter-shot delay, which is also so high that it borders on unusable. Either way, this is going to significantly reduce the usability of these things as digital cameras.
It is completely unenforceable. Since these devices won't hard-wire a button to make a beep, this is just going to be a little bit of firmware. Given that we already have open source camera firmware for a wide variety of digital cameras, all these people have to do is use any of those cameras and presto, no more beeps. I'd imagine there are similar hacking efforts for camera phones, and I don't even think it's necessary to mention Android around here, but... yeah, Android. There is simply no possibility of preventing people from disabling something that intrusive and obnoxious. It is fundamentally impossible to ship a camera phone in which the beep can't be turned off.
Even if you ignore software patches, your average idiot could take out four screws, remove the back, and cut one of the speaker wires. Presto. No more beep. Want to make calls? Put in a switch. You've just raised the level of difficulty from "average idiot" to "unskilled amateur with a soldering pencil". Either way, it's eye-roll simple.
Real stalkers don't use camera phones anyway. They use 300mm zoom lenses from 300 feet away. Even with a real mechanical shutter, the intended victim won't hear the click.
So basically, this A. is completely unenforceable, B. turns cell phone cameras into a HUGE nuisance, and C. creates yet another regulatory headache for manufacturers, all without do
Spot on. From what I've seen, the people writing 99.999% of the music these days have less musical talent than a French poodle. Ignoring the Beatles and the Carpenters, in the popular music of the last fifty years, I can count the number of times I've heard anything approaching good counterpoint or voice leading on one hand. These days, people only recognize harmony if it is moving in parallel sixths, fifths, fourths, or thirds, depending on inversion.... It makes me want to retch.
No, Songsmith isn't the death of music. It's just the tombstone that they've erected now that they finally figured out where the "music" industry buried it some thirty years ago.
There's a fine line here. Being a nation of immigrants is one thing. Bringing in tens of thousands of people from overseas to do work at lower pay than U.S. employees so that U.S. companies can make higher profit margins is another. I'd be amazed if there were truly a single H1B job that couldn't be filled by a U.S. citizen. Companies just don't want to pay what it costs to fill them that way, as it usually involves relocation expenses and stealing someone away from a different type of job that pays more.
I'm strongly of the opinion that H1B visas need to be given careful scrutiny, and that for every H1B issued, the company should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the position can't be filled by someone local. A good start might be advertising the position for two years and not getting a single applicant who meets the base qualifications. If a company hasn't done that, it's a safe bet that the company is abusing H1Bs.
As for whether H1B visas are trade, the answer is pretty clearly "no". There's a nearly perfect trade imbalance. We're employing tens of thousands of people from countries that employ pretty close to zero people from the U.S.. This is not a very efficient way of doing things. If Americans can't do the job, we need to fix our education system so that it spits out people who are qualified, not Band-Aid® the problem by bringing in foreign workers to do it.
And FWIW, you can't tell me that there are any IT jobs that Americans can't do. I might be convinced about some esoteric systems programming job (in which you want to hire the person who wrote a particular chunk of code originally), but IT jobs? No way. The employers just don't want to pay the rates needed to hire and retain Americans who would otherwise lean towards higher-paying programming jobs. That's not sufficient grounds to grant them an H1B. We should tell those companies to suck it up....
Again, I'm not saying Americans can replace all of the H1B workers---there are probably a few places where they can't---but right now, people seem afraid to even ask the question, which IMHO is just as shortsighted as the people who scream "throw them all out". The key word here is "balance", and companies that hire more and more H1B employees as they cut American workers by the thousands are pretty clearly on the wrong side of the balancing beam.
Wouldn't that suggest that removing the child pornography is reducing the rate of molestations?
Only if the increased arrests were the result of better detection, investigation, and arrest. In this Internet era, I'm not convinced that this is very likely. Twenty years ago, someone interested in something illegal (whether child porn or drugs or... whatever) would have to know someone. That someone wouldn't exactly advertise, so he/she would be hard to find, and the odds of getting turned in for asking were significant. These days, a web search would likely turn up such content without much effort, or at least would turn up information that would lead you to other information that would eventually get you there, all without ever speaking to another human being. Thus, the probability of someone getting turned in is significantly lower than it was twenty years ago.
From this, we can conclude that more people are getting caught, more people are looking for that material than before. That's not saying that the percentage of people who would like to look for it has increased, merely that the ease of availability and the perception of anonymity has made it more likely that someone curious would take the risk and look for such material. Either way, if more people are exposed to the material as a percentage of the population but fewer people are hurting children, it pretty much goes without saying that enforcement of child porn laws is not the reason for the drop in molestation.
The reason for the drop in molestation is most likely because of the reduced social stigma of being a molestation victim when compared with the way things were thirty or forty years ago. Kids are more comfortable coming forward, so A. the molesters are more likely to get caught before they have the opportunity to reoffend, and B. potential molesters are more wary of getting caught.
That said, there's a second reason that should give everyone pause: given a choice between the high risk of getting caught molesting someone and the relatively low risk of getting caught by viewing child porn downloaded over the Internet, most would-be molesters are smart enough to choose the latter. In effect, the near-ubiquitous availability of child pornography serves to reduce the incidence of molestation by providing these people with a relatively innocuous outlet for their urges. In a world of perfect enforcement of child porn laws, I have no doubt that the rate of actual molestation would increase, not decrease.
Of course, I'm not in any way suggesting that anyone should make it easier to get child pornography. Clearly children should not be exposed to that for precisely the reasons you mention---the risk that children would think that such behavior was normal and expected. I very much agree with you on that point. The right level of enforcement for this would ensure that it remains seen as deviant behavior to discourage production and discourage people from thinking that molestation is in any way normal, but at the same time, not stigmatize it to the point that the sorts of people who would view it feel that they'd be safer molesting an actual child. It's a tricky balance to get right.
Actually I agree with the poster below who points out that nudity is not necessarily pornography
Unfortunately, the U.S. courts tend to disagree more often than not. You're right that it should not be considered pornography, but it frequently is. You're right that a big part of the problem here is the rather loose definition of pornography. That said, if the girls in question had been touching themselves in a sexual way, odds are the courts would say that those photos cross the line about 99% of the time. Of course, it still should not be a crime for the boys to receive the photos unless they actively solicited them, and possibly not even then, given the age of the people in question. It is truly a sign of the hypocrisy of the times that in an era where so many people lose their virginity in high school, so may people still try to pretend that it doesn't happen and would say that these kids are bad people for doing this. Very sad.
Evolutionary, yes, but when you look at the percentage of change, it rapidly approaches the entirety of the OS by the time you get three or four releases away. X PB didn't even visually resemble 10.5, doesn't share the same case-sensitive filesystem support with 10.5 (UFS vs. HFSX), doesn't have any notion of DNS service discovery, has a completely different printing system, didn't have any of the Core Animation or Core Image functionality that makes so many Mac graphics apps possible, etc. Even at the BSD level, X PB behaved more like a BSD variant while 10.5 behaves generally like an AT&T UNIX variant.
My point is that sufficient evolutionary change without seeing the in-between stages is almost indistinguishable from a ground up rewrite....
Inclined to understatement much? I'd say that BSD being on about 1 out of every 12 PCs sold worldwide qualifies as more than "relatively successful", but maybe it's just me.:-)
Yes, it matters. It matters a lot. People who bought Vista and installed it because they liked it are the sorts of people who might upgrade to Windows 7. People who run Vista because it came preinstalled and they couldn't be bothered to request a downgrade to XP are similarly unlikely to spend the money, time, or effort to upgrade to Windows 7.
By that definition, Mac OS X v10.5 and Mac OS X Public Beta are the same OS (printer drivers notwithstanding). You remember Public Beta---the version that didn't even have an Apple menu....
A well written OS should generally work with the same drivers as previous versions with few exceptions. Every now and then it isn't possible, but for the most part, it is not only possible, but also desirable.... Using driver compatibility as a metric is a really bad way to judge whether something is the same OS or not....
Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista.
The display subsystem is designed in such a way that any apps that use GDI for drawing get all their windows double buffered, resulting in memory bloat and poor performance (source: Guardian.co.uk). Indeed, changes in the window management system result in a huge reduction in memory footprint in Windows 7. A fifty percent reduction in backing store size is not a small improvement by any stretch of the imagination, particularly when you consider that most of that bloat represented a Vista regression relative to XP....
The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....
They weren't lied to. When Vista came out, it was a compatibility disaster. The rest of the computing world simply wasn't ready for it when it was released, so drivers weren't ready, apps didn't work, etc. The rest of the computing world kept right on improving, though, and users kept on upgrading their software, drivers, etc. Thus, at this point, most people have versions of apps and drivers that are compatible with Vista, most hardware manufacturers have working Vista drivers, etc. As a result, Vista isn't as much of a train wreck as it was a few years ago, nor is Windows 7 for the same reason.
Of course, if someone upgraded to Vista today, he/she would find that Vista still uses way more RAM than it should (and way more than XP uses), but that's one of the things Windows 7 is supposed to be addressing. Don't underestimate how important that is when it comes to overall usability, performance, etc. Those "minor" improvements to Vista are not really minor. They just aren't feature changes. There's a difference.
Oh wait, I forgot Child Porn laws are no longer about the harm and damage done to the child during the creation of the material in question...
Child porn laws were never about protecting the victim. If they were, possession would not be a crime. In fact, if child porn laws were designed to protect children, they would explicitly provide for the legality of possession unless the possessor is also the producer so that people would be more comfortable coming forward to the police and show this stuff to them to get the producers caught.
As soon as you make possession of anything a crime, you've crossed the line from trying to protect the victims into the territory of trying to prevent a type of thought or behavior. It's all about cleansing the public of what certain groups consider "bad thoughts". <sarcasm>God help us all if teenagers think about sex. God help us doubly so if a 17-year-old (or worse, 18) thinks about sex with a 15-year-old. That's a grave danger to our society....</sarcasm>
If child porn laws were designed to protect children, they would never apply to the exchange of material between two consenting people regardless of age because that is not the exploitation of children. It should only apply to the further proliferation of that material or to situations in which an adult more than... I don't know, eight years older than the non-adult... takes the photographs himself/herself. Here why: if a teenager is over at your house and flashes you, nothing happens, but if she decides to send you a photo of her flashing you via email or AIM, you can go to jail for receiving it even if you didn't ask for it. That's not justice---not by any stretch of the imagination. That's entrapment.
No, child porn laws were never about protecting the children from molestation, etc. They were always about a puritanical desire to cleanse the world of thoughts that the most conservative elements of society consider bad. The number of people arrested for child porn possession has been steadily rising, but the child molestation rate has been steadily dropping. If there were any truth at all to the flawed concept that reducing child porn will reduce molestation, the molestation rate should have been increasing proportional to the possession. Because there is not only not a correlation, but also a reverse correlation, we can state fairly definitively that criminalizing possession (except in cases where the possessor also produced it) has had zero or negative impact on reducing child molestation.
So why is it a law, then? Because a lot of people are attached to their naive little fantasy that adults are never attracted to anyone until they turn 18 and then they magically become attractive. This is, of course, absurd. The reasons 40-year-old guys don't sleep with 16-year-old girls are twofold. First, the 16-year-olds aren't interested. Second, the 40-year-old guys have enough self control to realize that if the 16-year-olds were interested, it would probably be taking advantage of them.
That said, this is just as true for a 40-year-old and an 18-year-old. People don't magically become "adults" at 18. There are many, many people I know who I have considered children well into their late 20s and many, many people I know who I have considered adults at 14. People mature emotionally and mentally at radically different rates, and you can't come up with an non-absurd law that protects the naive from their own naïveté---ban anything sexual involving people under 30? Yeah, that's going to fly. So instead, we continue with the naive belief that these laws help people when in fact they don't do crap.
About the only law that would make sense would be a law that somehow says that you can't get someone to pose nude if that person is not already sexually active, but that becomes a he-said, she-said problem, making it a nearly useless law. Better to just drop this law on the floor entirely. Laws against child porn possession don't serve the public interest, and this case is just further proof of that, along with the dozen other cases like it in the last year....
And Quantum went to crap long before that. I had a pile of dead Quantum drives by the time Maxtor bought them. It almost approaches my pile of recently dead Seagate drives (not literally, thanks to the 5-year warranty, but...). Between those, I went through a pile of dead WD drives and a couple of dead IBM/Toshiba drives. All hard drives suck. The only good hard drive is one of the pair you have locked in a cool, dry vault three states away that contain the fourth and fifth backup copies of the data you care about....
Because the word "hi" is rarely verbed; if it were, it would have to have an irregular singular verb form, at which point everybody would screw that up, too. "He hi's at the cute girl around the corner every time he drives by." See how unfortunate that would be?
22 milli-bits per second? You're off by about six decimal places there. And yes, I could do better by hand, too. I could do better with IP-over-avian-carrier... with a dead bird, using a bunch of hired day laborers with slingshots for its locomotion.
Agreed. In my next house, I'm leaving the gas dryer behind for somebody else to deal with. Gas costs more than electric and it takes twice as long to get the clothes still-not-quite-dry. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have bought a gas dryer.
I don't care how many people you have in your house. If you're using $300 worth of power for your refrigerator, washer, dryer, water heater, oven, TVs, etc. with no heat or A/C on, then either you are paying $5 per kWh or you are leaking power somewhere. Check to see if three of your neighbors are hooked up off your power meter, then buy yourself a Kill-a-Watt or similar and start figuring out which of your appliances is massively defective.
If you are paying $5 per kWh, of course, ignore the above and go immediately to solar. It would pay for itself in a year or two....:-D
Depends on how high your electric rate is;. If you're in PG&E territory and are paying some of your electricity at the $0.31 or $0.33 per kWh rate, my calculations a couple of years ago suggested that adding enough solar panels to get rid of that last little bit of usage would pay for itself in under 5 years even at current prices with current solar panel tech. If you're in TVA territory paying an average of 6.4 cents per kWh, solar panels are not likely to pay for themselves at all if you believe the lifetime info.
However, the lifetime info is only half of the story. The lifetime quoted is the expected number of years for which the panels will provide at least... I think it is 85% of their full rating. That means two things. First, calculations about how long the panels take to pay for themselves tend to be off slightly because they fail to take that degradation into account. Second, the panels will likely still be producing some power even if you leave them up there for a hundred years. They just won't be producing their full rated capacity even when in full sunlight. You might, however, need to repair panels periodically due to electromigration and/or thermal flexing causing the wiring between cells to fail or whatever.
BTW, most of the solar panels I've seen for the past several years have been rated for 30 years, not 20.
If I could, I'd gladly shed 20% of my pay for a 4-day workweek. I might even be persuaded to shed more than 20% to get a four-day work week.:-) I would not, however, want to lose time in my evenings to work more hours to get the same or similar pay. Well, some evenings it would be okay, but other days I'd have to make it up on the front end because of evening activities, and I wouldn't much like making it up on the front end. (Wait, there's a 7:00 in the morning? Why didn't anyone tell me!?!)
That argument is also non-persuasive. Your computer will not cease to support USB devices merely because you chose to buy a device that uses a different standard. Given the fact that most keyboard these days are USB, it is safe to say that USB will not die out any time soon. That doesn't make it a particularly good way to connect a hard drive, though, inasmuch as gasoline's ready availability does not make it a good home heating solution. You can do it, but if your needs are too great, it can really blow up in your face.
And from what I've seen, they don't call it POS for nothing---the two definitions are basically interchangeable when it comes to point of sale systems....
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Legally, yes, they are "people". They aren't, though; they don't have the same rights. They don't have the right to vote, have much more restricted freedom of speech, have significantly different rights when it comes to contract disputes with individuals (because of the presumption that the are a much stronger party), etc. It's a pretty big stsretch to call a manufacturer a person in any reasonable sense of the word.
But unless the House page discussing the bill is failing to mention something fairly fundamental, this bill doesn't do that. The bill wouldn't affect end users. It doesn't take away the user's right to modify a phone to not make a sound. It mandates that the phone, as shipped from the manufacturer, must do so and must not provide a way to turn it off. I'm not sure why the blogger thought that this allows prosecution of individuals. This bill could not prevent possession of cameras that don't beep even if it wanted to, as doing so would criminalize the possession of (and thus completely obliterate the resale value of) nearly every cellular phone built to date. If you want to ensure you never get elected to another public office as long as you live, pass a law that makes every one of your constituents replace his/her cell phone under penalty of incarceration.... :-)
Even still, this bill is beyond idiotic for so many reasons, it's hard to know where to begin. I'll take a shot, though.
So basically, this A. is completely unenforceable, B. turns cell phone cameras into a HUGE nuisance, and C. creates yet another regulatory headache for manufacturers, all without do
Spot on. From what I've seen, the people writing 99.999% of the music these days have less musical talent than a French poodle. Ignoring the Beatles and the Carpenters, in the popular music of the last fifty years, I can count the number of times I've heard anything approaching good counterpoint or voice leading on one hand. These days, people only recognize harmony if it is moving in parallel sixths, fifths, fourths, or thirds, depending on inversion.... It makes me want to retch.
No, Songsmith isn't the death of music. It's just the tombstone that they've erected now that they finally figured out where the "music" industry buried it some thirty years ago.
Nope. Reality TV did that quite well on its own....
There's a fine line here. Being a nation of immigrants is one thing. Bringing in tens of thousands of people from overseas to do work at lower pay than U.S. employees so that U.S. companies can make higher profit margins is another. I'd be amazed if there were truly a single H1B job that couldn't be filled by a U.S. citizen. Companies just don't want to pay what it costs to fill them that way, as it usually involves relocation expenses and stealing someone away from a different type of job that pays more.
I'm strongly of the opinion that H1B visas need to be given careful scrutiny, and that for every H1B issued, the company should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the position can't be filled by someone local. A good start might be advertising the position for two years and not getting a single applicant who meets the base qualifications. If a company hasn't done that, it's a safe bet that the company is abusing H1Bs.
As for whether H1B visas are trade, the answer is pretty clearly "no". There's a nearly perfect trade imbalance. We're employing tens of thousands of people from countries that employ pretty close to zero people from the U.S.. This is not a very efficient way of doing things. If Americans can't do the job, we need to fix our education system so that it spits out people who are qualified, not Band-Aid® the problem by bringing in foreign workers to do it.
And FWIW, you can't tell me that there are any IT jobs that Americans can't do. I might be convinced about some esoteric systems programming job (in which you want to hire the person who wrote a particular chunk of code originally), but IT jobs? No way. The employers just don't want to pay the rates needed to hire and retain Americans who would otherwise lean towards higher-paying programming jobs. That's not sufficient grounds to grant them an H1B. We should tell those companies to suck it up....
Again, I'm not saying Americans can replace all of the H1B workers---there are probably a few places where they can't---but right now, people seem afraid to even ask the question, which IMHO is just as shortsighted as the people who scream "throw them all out". The key word here is "balance", and companies that hire more and more H1B employees as they cut American workers by the thousands are pretty clearly on the wrong side of the balancing beam.
Only if the increased arrests were the result of better detection, investigation, and arrest. In this Internet era, I'm not convinced that this is very likely. Twenty years ago, someone interested in something illegal (whether child porn or drugs or... whatever) would have to know someone. That someone wouldn't exactly advertise, so he/she would be hard to find, and the odds of getting turned in for asking were significant. These days, a web search would likely turn up such content without much effort, or at least would turn up information that would lead you to other information that would eventually get you there, all without ever speaking to another human being. Thus, the probability of someone getting turned in is significantly lower than it was twenty years ago.
From this, we can conclude that more people are getting caught, more people are looking for that material than before. That's not saying that the percentage of people who would like to look for it has increased, merely that the ease of availability and the perception of anonymity has made it more likely that someone curious would take the risk and look for such material. Either way, if more people are exposed to the material as a percentage of the population but fewer people are hurting children, it pretty much goes without saying that enforcement of child porn laws is not the reason for the drop in molestation.
The reason for the drop in molestation is most likely because of the reduced social stigma of being a molestation victim when compared with the way things were thirty or forty years ago. Kids are more comfortable coming forward, so A. the molesters are more likely to get caught before they have the opportunity to reoffend, and B. potential molesters are more wary of getting caught.
That said, there's a second reason that should give everyone pause: given a choice between the high risk of getting caught molesting someone and the relatively low risk of getting caught by viewing child porn downloaded over the Internet, most would-be molesters are smart enough to choose the latter. In effect, the near-ubiquitous availability of child pornography serves to reduce the incidence of molestation by providing these people with a relatively innocuous outlet for their urges. In a world of perfect enforcement of child porn laws, I have no doubt that the rate of actual molestation would increase, not decrease.
Of course, I'm not in any way suggesting that anyone should make it easier to get child pornography. Clearly children should not be exposed to that for precisely the reasons you mention---the risk that children would think that such behavior was normal and expected. I very much agree with you on that point. The right level of enforcement for this would ensure that it remains seen as deviant behavior to discourage production and discourage people from thinking that molestation is in any way normal, but at the same time, not stigmatize it to the point that the sorts of people who would view it feel that they'd be safer molesting an actual child. It's a tricky balance to get right.
Unfortunately, the U.S. courts tend to disagree more often than not. You're right that it should not be considered pornography, but it frequently is. You're right that a big part of the problem here is the rather loose definition of pornography. That said, if the girls in question had been touching themselves in a sexual way, odds are the courts would say that those photos cross the line about 99% of the time. Of course, it still should not be a crime for the boys to receive the photos unless they actively solicited them, and possibly not even then, given the age of the people in question. It is truly a sign of the hypocrisy of the times that in an era where so many people lose their virginity in high school, so may people still try to pretend that it doesn't happen and would say that these kids are bad people for doing this. Very sad.
Evolutionary, yes, but when you look at the percentage of change, it rapidly approaches the entirety of the OS by the time you get three or four releases away. X PB didn't even visually resemble 10.5, doesn't share the same case-sensitive filesystem support with 10.5 (UFS vs. HFSX), doesn't have any notion of DNS service discovery, has a completely different printing system, didn't have any of the Core Animation or Core Image functionality that makes so many Mac graphics apps possible, etc. Even at the BSD level, X PB behaved more like a BSD variant while 10.5 behaves generally like an AT&T UNIX variant.
My point is that sufficient evolutionary change without seeing the in-between stages is almost indistinguishable from a ground up rewrite....
Inclined to understatement much? I'd say that BSD being on about 1 out of every 12 PCs sold worldwide qualifies as more than "relatively successful", but maybe it's just me. :-)
Yes, it matters. It matters a lot. People who bought Vista and installed it because they liked it are the sorts of people who might upgrade to Windows 7. People who run Vista because it came preinstalled and they couldn't be bothered to request a downgrade to XP are similarly unlikely to spend the money, time, or effort to upgrade to Windows 7.
By that definition, Mac OS X v10.5 and Mac OS X Public Beta are the same OS (printer drivers notwithstanding). You remember Public Beta---the version that didn't even have an Apple menu....
A well written OS should generally work with the same drivers as previous versions with few exceptions. Every now and then it isn't possible, but for the most part, it is not only possible, but also desirable.... Using driver compatibility as a metric is a really bad way to judge whether something is the same OS or not....
Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista.
The display subsystem is designed in such a way that any apps that use GDI for drawing get all their windows double buffered, resulting in memory bloat and poor performance (source: Guardian.co.uk). Indeed, changes in the window management system result in a huge reduction in memory footprint in Windows 7. A fifty percent reduction in backing store size is not a small improvement by any stretch of the imagination, particularly when you consider that most of that bloat represented a Vista regression relative to XP....
The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....
They weren't lied to. When Vista came out, it was a compatibility disaster. The rest of the computing world simply wasn't ready for it when it was released, so drivers weren't ready, apps didn't work, etc. The rest of the computing world kept right on improving, though, and users kept on upgrading their software, drivers, etc. Thus, at this point, most people have versions of apps and drivers that are compatible with Vista, most hardware manufacturers have working Vista drivers, etc. As a result, Vista isn't as much of a train wreck as it was a few years ago, nor is Windows 7 for the same reason.
Of course, if someone upgraded to Vista today, he/she would find that Vista still uses way more RAM than it should (and way more than XP uses), but that's one of the things Windows 7 is supposed to be addressing. Don't underestimate how important that is when it comes to overall usability, performance, etc. Those "minor" improvements to Vista are not really minor. They just aren't feature changes. There's a difference.
And "H" is normally is associated with Hillary Clinton. Removing the "H" keys would just be too weird.
Child porn laws were never about protecting the victim. If they were, possession would not be a crime. In fact, if child porn laws were designed to protect children, they would explicitly provide for the legality of possession unless the possessor is also the producer so that people would be more comfortable coming forward to the police and show this stuff to them to get the producers caught.
As soon as you make possession of anything a crime, you've crossed the line from trying to protect the victims into the territory of trying to prevent a type of thought or behavior. It's all about cleansing the public of what certain groups consider "bad thoughts". <sarcasm>God help us all if teenagers think about sex. God help us doubly so if a 17-year-old (or worse, 18) thinks about sex with a 15-year-old. That's a grave danger to our society....</sarcasm>
If child porn laws were designed to protect children, they would never apply to the exchange of material between two consenting people regardless of age because that is not the exploitation of children. It should only apply to the further proliferation of that material or to situations in which an adult more than... I don't know, eight years older than the non-adult... takes the photographs himself/herself. Here why: if a teenager is over at your house and flashes you, nothing happens, but if she decides to send you a photo of her flashing you via email or AIM, you can go to jail for receiving it even if you didn't ask for it. That's not justice---not by any stretch of the imagination. That's entrapment.
No, child porn laws were never about protecting the children from molestation, etc. They were always about a puritanical desire to cleanse the world of thoughts that the most conservative elements of society consider bad. The number of people arrested for child porn possession has been steadily rising, but the child molestation rate has been steadily dropping. If there were any truth at all to the flawed concept that reducing child porn will reduce molestation, the molestation rate should have been increasing proportional to the possession. Because there is not only not a correlation, but also a reverse correlation, we can state fairly definitively that criminalizing possession (except in cases where the possessor also produced it) has had zero or negative impact on reducing child molestation.
So why is it a law, then? Because a lot of people are attached to their naive little fantasy that adults are never attracted to anyone until they turn 18 and then they magically become attractive. This is, of course, absurd. The reasons 40-year-old guys don't sleep with 16-year-old girls are twofold. First, the 16-year-olds aren't interested. Second, the 40-year-old guys have enough self control to realize that if the 16-year-olds were interested, it would probably be taking advantage of them.
That said, this is just as true for a 40-year-old and an 18-year-old. People don't magically become "adults" at 18. There are many, many people I know who I have considered children well into their late 20s and many, many people I know who I have considered adults at 14. People mature emotionally and mentally at radically different rates, and you can't come up with an non-absurd law that protects the naive from their own naïveté---ban anything sexual involving people under 30? Yeah, that's going to fly. So instead, we continue with the naive belief that these laws help people when in fact they don't do crap.
About the only law that would make sense would be a law that somehow says that you can't get someone to pose nude if that person is not already sexually active, but that becomes a he-said, she-said problem, making it a nearly useless law. Better to just drop this law on the floor entirely. Laws against child porn possession don't serve the public interest, and this case is just further proof of that, along with the dozen other cases like it in the last year....
And Quantum went to crap long before that. I had a pile of dead Quantum drives by the time Maxtor bought them. It almost approaches my pile of recently dead Seagate drives (not literally, thanks to the 5-year warranty, but...). Between those, I went through a pile of dead WD drives and a couple of dead IBM/Toshiba drives. All hard drives suck. The only good hard drive is one of the pair you have locked in a cool, dry vault three states away that contain the fourth and fifth backup copies of the data you care about....
Quit writing in octal and it might help. Try writing it as 79% like everybody else.
Because the word "hi" is rarely verbed; if it were, it would have to have an irregular singular verb form, at which point everybody would screw that up, too. "He hi's at the cute girl around the corner every time he drives by." See how unfortunate that would be?
22 milli-bits per second? You're off by about six decimal places there. And yes, I could do better by hand, too. I could do better with IP-over-avian-carrier... with a dead bird, using a bunch of hired day laborers with slingshots for its locomotion.
Agreed. In my next house, I'm leaving the gas dryer behind for somebody else to deal with. Gas costs more than electric and it takes twice as long to get the clothes still-not-quite-dry. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have bought a gas dryer.
I don't care how many people you have in your house. If you're using $300 worth of power for your refrigerator, washer, dryer, water heater, oven, TVs, etc. with no heat or A/C on, then either you are paying $5 per kWh or you are leaking power somewhere. Check to see if three of your neighbors are hooked up off your power meter, then buy yourself a Kill-a-Watt or similar and start figuring out which of your appliances is massively defective.
If you are paying $5 per kWh, of course, ignore the above and go immediately to solar. It would pay for itself in a year or two.... :-D
Depends on how high your electric rate is;. If you're in PG&E territory and are paying some of your electricity at the $0.31 or $0.33 per kWh rate, my calculations a couple of years ago suggested that adding enough solar panels to get rid of that last little bit of usage would pay for itself in under 5 years even at current prices with current solar panel tech. If you're in TVA territory paying an average of 6.4 cents per kWh, solar panels are not likely to pay for themselves at all if you believe the lifetime info.
However, the lifetime info is only half of the story. The lifetime quoted is the expected number of years for which the panels will provide at least... I think it is 85% of their full rating. That means two things. First, calculations about how long the panels take to pay for themselves tend to be off slightly because they fail to take that degradation into account. Second, the panels will likely still be producing some power even if you leave them up there for a hundred years. They just won't be producing their full rated capacity even when in full sunlight. You might, however, need to repair panels periodically due to electromigration and/or thermal flexing causing the wiring between cells to fail or whatever.
BTW, most of the solar panels I've seen for the past several years have been rated for 30 years, not 20.
If I could, I'd gladly shed 20% of my pay for a 4-day workweek. I might even be persuaded to shed more than 20% to get a four-day work week. :-) I would not, however, want to lose time in my evenings to work more hours to get the same or similar pay. Well, some evenings it would be okay, but other days I'd have to make it up on the front end because of evening activities, and I wouldn't much like making it up on the front end. (Wait, there's a 7:00 in the morning? Why didn't anyone tell me!?!)
That argument is also non-persuasive. Your computer will not cease to support USB devices merely because you chose to buy a device that uses a different standard. Given the fact that most keyboard these days are USB, it is safe to say that USB will not die out any time soon. That doesn't make it a particularly good way to connect a hard drive, though, inasmuch as gasoline's ready availability does not make it a good home heating solution. You can do it, but if your needs are too great, it can really blow up in your face.
A single USB hard drive on a USB 2.0 bus at full throttle sucks down something like 40% of a CPU core by itself. With a 10x boost....
:-)
And from what I've seen, they don't call it POS for nothing---the two definitions are basically interchangeable when it comes to point of sale systems....