404 doesn't tell you to do anything. It only ask you to show that you have internal controls and that they are deemed sufficient for a company of the type/size you're working for, and that you actually is following your controls.
That's the rub, and that's why this guy is suing. He owned a small accounting firm because, no matter what he did, the SarBox auditor's board determined what he was doing wasn't good enough, and the only changes they would accept would prevent him from turning a profit.
The SarBox board killed a legitimate business that was operating in good-faith compliance.
That's far, far too much power for a bunch of nameless beureaucrats.
Really, two factor authentication only offers meager protection from a subset of attacks, yet I can tell you that implimenting it at each company was probably a $50k project, or, for the less efficient companies, a $200k project.
ROI for Sar-Box is shit. We've got a hell of a lot more expenses for a teeny bit more security.
The sad fact is, it probably WOULD break SarBox compliance, it's frickin retarded.
Just about everything a company does relates to SarBox either directly or indirectly, so often an IT department will become terrified to make the smallest change to avoid inadvertantly breaking compliance, or making a change while staying compliance will require more money than the change is worth.
I.e. if you request a change to save $2000 a month in productivity losses, but maintaining the change will cost $4000 a month, it does not make sense to make the change. Period. SarBox has significantly raised the cost of even minor IT changes that have anything to do with private data (even indirectly).
Not if the fines scale in relation to the amount of information that was lost, and compensatory damages are included requiring payment of the estimated damages for each individual person's data loss (not an average spread to everyone). Of course the individual data evaluations must be done by a firm chosen by the courts, and paid in full by company that lost the data.
It's pretty easy to structure the law such that almost any company will be bankrupted by failing to secure data. That would also be silly, because no company can guarantee that no data will ever be stolen, so if you place the requirements too heavily on the fact that the data went missing, and disregard the amount of effort the company put into keeping the data safe, you could be destroying companies that do not desearve to be destroyed.
Generally, the best way to handle these things is to keep the language of the law vague enough that it can be decided on a case by case basis - i.e. the company did their best to protect their data, and so should recieve little or no punishment.
SarBox is the worst possible solution - it mandates security measures that are ineffective (because in the real world, the mandated measures were obsolete after a few months time) that are expensive to impliment and yield little or no added security.
One visible example is banking - you now have an image tied to your account login to prevent phishing. However, most people don't pay too much attention to it, and wouldn't care if it were different. Or, they'll use it that one time, it doesn't work like it is supposed to (because it's actually at a phishing site), they try again later and now it works (because it is now actualy at the bank website). Since it works, it must have just been some minor hiccup, and all is right with the world. Right? No, they just got their account access stolen, and if a person is smart they'll slowly siphon the money off instead of withdrawing large chunks of cash.
It's also easy to harass someone now, because of the strict regulations if you manage to find someone's account (or at a big bank, just randomly choose numbers) but can't access it, just plug a bunch of gibberish in a few times and they don't have access to their own money. That can be devastating, and it's untraceable if the harasser is using a public terminal.
SarBox aught to have been more vague, and focused on the good faith effort to secure a client's data. People get into trouble when they aren't handling data using the industry's best practices that way, for if the institution never bothered to check what the latest best practices were, they obviously weren't too interested in data security.
Setting it up that way, instead of with complex rules and regulations, give it the flexibility to adapt and apply to each situation, and there is no risk of it ever going obsolete, unlike the current SarBox law.
You heard the man, noone use the Internet until this is done.
I don't see why the Noones weren't allowed to use the internet before, or why they'll have to stop when this is over, but it's nice that you're willing to let them use it a little bit, I guess.
I've just gotten into it, after resisting for years, and honestly the most fun I'm having is playing at the auction house. I've only been playing WoW for a month or so, but in the last week or so I've learned how to work it and earned over 200 gold with a lvl 11 character.
Were I on a medium or heavily populated server I'd have made 2-3 times that much by now, it's great fun. I'm sure I'll get tired of it when I have thousands of gold and nothing to spend it on (due to low level chars), but till then I'm having a ball.
However, any respectable psychologist/neuroscientist knows that you won't be able to explain what colorblindness feels like from looking at an MRI scan or comparing results on a color discrimination task.
A grad student physicist, however, will not (well, a reasonable one might).
I think you missed his point. Neurology and Psychology may be drawn closer together by a better understanding of the physical workings of the brain, but in no way, shape, or form has Neurology helped a Psychologist understand what a person with a particular brain malfunction actually feels.
That's the point he was trying to make, I think. While certain aspects of the fields which DO overlap become more meshed together, it's becoming clearer that Neurology will never take the place of Psychology, or vice versa. The thought was that the more we understood the physical workings of the brain, the more we'd understand its abstract workings. The GP is saying this is not bearing out.
I really have no idea myself, but it makes some sense to me.
2500 expert reviewers, sure, but only a few hundred people did the original research, everyone else just said "yup yup, looks good to me".
There really aren't all that many people who go out into the boonies and collect data, and even if there WERE 2500 scientists doing field work, that's still ridiculously low for the kind of influence these people have over climate-change legislation.
We aren't funding good research, we're just using the shot gun method to fix something that we aren't entirely sure we've broken (and spending far, far more than good research would cost). In our own human history over the last few thousand years we have had ice ages and periods of almost universaly tropical temperatures, both much higher and much lower than we currently see now. Many of the long-term temperature studies (ice cores, tree cores, etc) are susceptible to bias, both intentional and unintentional.
It would be really nice if we had definitive evidence that humans are contributing a major portion of the warming that we see, but instead all we have are correlations. Everybody likes to point out the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation, but we seem to forget that when talking about global warming. Hell, twenty years ago all the scientists were saying we were headed for a new ice age if we don't change our ways!
Seriously, the data to me seems far, far to sparse and inconsistant to draw any meaningful conclusions. You can build all the models you want, but if your data sucks it isn't going to do you any good.
But I argue that aluminum is not a naturally occurring substance...
Then I'd argue you're a moron. Aluminum is what is commonly known as a basic element. It's not a compound of anything, it isn't created in a lab, it's dug up out of the earth.
Now, I'll agree with your point that getting it into a useable form requires processing, but so do algae pellets, bio fuel, orange juice and that nice, tasty steak. You seem to be implying that there is no such thing as a naturally occurring substance, which is obviously false.
Furthermore, aluminum is extremely recyclable, and can be recovered with only 5% of the energy costs of the initial refinement. The more aluminum we refine the more we have available for recycling, so while it is extremely expensive, the total energy cost of aluminum does not go up linearly with our aluminum consumption. Also, one of the primary goals of the industry is reducing the cost of refinement, which is directly related to the energy consumption and environmental impact.
So yeah, aluminum is costly monetarily and environmentally on the front end, but it has a very long back end re-useability that makes it much much cheaper in the long run.
Volatile, particularly when refering to explosive material, means unstable. Nitro-glycerin is volatile, TNT is less so even though they have a similar explosiveness (TNT is made from nitro-glycerin). Volatility has nothing to do with explosiveness, though a lot of extremely volatile substances (like nitro-glycerin) explosive precisely because they are so volatile.
Atoms are absolutely non-volatile, but if you can manage to split one - BOOOOM!!
You essentially said "Hard to light? It is extremely easy to light, just hard to light." That doesn't make any sense.
See the problem? It's very energetic, even explosive, but it isn't volatile.
The point is that while Aluminum is plentiful in our solar system, water is not - though there would be enough for most purposes should we need to land and collect. When you get outside of our solar system, the prospect is even grimmer. There is Aluminum almost everywhere you go in the Universe, but water is rare.
Still, one space ship would only need to find a relatively miniscule amount to re-fuel.
I remember thinking there was something inherent about PC hardware that meant you had to reboot in order to change IP address...
I recently had to repair a network filled with Win98 boxes and a Win2000 server, and OH MY GOD was it annoying! Sure, you can do DHCP, no problem, just need a quick reboot... Oh, you expected me to pick up the DNS via DHCP too? Sorry Charlie, that has to be set manually. No worries though, just punch in the IP addresses and give it a quick reboot... What's that? Something is wrong with the DHCP and you need a new IP address? No worries, just punch in the new one and give it a quick reboot...
Note that a "quick reboot" took at least 5-10 minutes. A two minute job in XP, with brain farts, took a half hour or more in Win98. Frustrating to no end, I don't know how we survived.
That is ridiculous, the only way Wal-Mart (or anybody else) can get the cheapest goods possible is by constantly seeking better deals. They are the ultimate cheapskate, true, but if you've ever actually been to Wal-Mart you'll notice they have a large selection of items in every category. Every cheap supplier out there is competing for a space on Wal-Mart's shelves, and this induces massive amounts of competition at the bottom level.
...leads to everybody concentrating on fewer "models" whose quality decreases as an unavoidable consequence of the price war, which means that after a while you can only get it in "medium" and it breaks or wears out quickly.
That was probably the worst example you could possibly give. Wal-Mart is one of the few places that sells clothes in everything from the most petite sizes on up to 3-4x big&tall. The people who shop at Wal-Mart, particularly for clothes, tend to be more interested in durability than style, and so Wal-Mart clothes tend to out-last any medium quality pair of clothes at much higher prices.
Go to Wal-Mart and look for a pair of men's jeans. You'll almost certainly find them in sizes up to 54" for under $30. Good, thick material too. Now go visit Abercrombie - you'll be hard pressed to find a pair of pants of any kind bigger than 42", you'll pay $100 or more for them, and they will be pre-worn, which makes them flimsy and not last nearly as long. This follows for pretty much all mid to high-end retailer of clothes.
So who is creating fewer "models" to choose from? You won't find a good pair of work clothes at American Eagle or Gap, and if you do happen to they are made for style not substance - you'd never want to actually do work in them. If you do happen to destroy your Wal-Mart work clothes, well, you can buy four of them for what you would have paid at another store, so who's losing out here? It's certainly not the Wal-Mart shopper.
Wal-Mart sells the high quality stuff that their customers want. They sell it at the cheapest price they can. And when the customer cares more about price than quality (which is usually the case for Wal-Mart shoppers), Wal-Mart seeks the cheapest prices possible. It is the customer's desires that determine the selection at Wal-Mart, if they don't care to have six different brands of jeans in twelve different styles, Wal-Mart is not going to stock it. Yet, they do to the degree that their customers purchase them, as you can find most of the styles the pricier stores carry at Wal-Mart for much less.
The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
I don't see how you can call providing a free $200 device to use a service they want anyway as "gouging". Sounds like a damn good deal to me. It's going to cost them around $600 a year to connect to the internet anyway, how is offering a portable service plus a $200 device "gouging"?
Nobody needs a portable laptop with wireless internet. People want such a thing, but people also want Ferraris. You can hardly say Ferrari gouges the poor because their cars are so expensive. It would be especially hard to argue that Microsoft gouges the poor by offering to lease a $1 million car for $1k per month if you agree to drive it around with their logo on the side for as long as you kept the car. I WISH they would do such a thing, everybody would be able to drive Ferraris then!
That's pretty much what you're calling "gouging" here. It doesn't make any sense.
Do you even understand what gouging is? It's certainly not bundling all kinds of free goodies with a service, that's basically the opposite of what gouging is. Gouging is when you know consumers MUST buy your product, so you jack the price up far more than it costs to produce the product and offer a low level of service. It's pretty much impossible to "gouge" on a product that people don't need to buy at all. It usually happens with things like utilities, gas, groceries, and other regular necessary consumables.
Until applications and data are built on completely open standards -- interoperable with ANY capable device -- this multiple OS business is just a hassle for consumers.
You haven't been paying much attention to where the technology is going, have you? As it stands right now, any program written for.Net that relies on the built-in namespaces instead of Windows specific API calls will run on Linux or Mac with the Mono CLI. That's the direction MS is moving, and they are the Giant Evil Corporation(tm) who is most likely to fight this sort of change. They have to move this direction, however, or else be passed by in the open movement that is going on.
Linux products like Wine and Crossover have been bridging the gap for years, and OS virtualization is becoming ubiquitous. It is possible right now to run any application on any computer with just a little bit of work, and it is only going to get easier in the future.
Wake up and smell the coffe man, what you want is exactly what the multi-OS competition is driving towards. Without this "hassle", nothing would happen at all, and you'd still get to complain forever. I'm sure that's all you really want, is something to complain about.
For instance, what if your a business traveler who spends a lot of time flying,
You know they have the internet on airplanes now, right?
...or when your drunk neighbor hits the cable box with this truck and your stuck without internet for a week.
Has this actually ever happened to you? And if you are so unlucky, has it ever happened more than once? It's probably far more common to forget to backup your data and have a hard drive failure, in fact I'm pretty sure it is. It's almost impossible for your drunk neighbor to hit the cable box in most situations, as they generally aren't placed in an area where people will be driving too incredibly close to. At least in my experience, anyway.
I'd be more worried about the power outage that ruins the drive with all your data on it, and have to spend $3k to maybe get it back.
I personally don't mind ads, especially Google's ads (which are apparently far more effective than the ugly banner ads). Most of the time I don't see them, and I'll gladly take free + ads over a paid service in almost every case.
For example, if I could get free cell phone service by agreeing to the occasional text advertisement or a banner on the background I'd jump at it. That would save me $80 per month, it's a huge value to me. If I get sick and tired of the ads, or I get a raise and the $80 savings is less of a deal, I might pay for the service to remove them.
The fact is, the Microsoft/Google battle has been very good for consumers. Bing, while not as good as Google yet IMO, is ten times better than searches were 5 years ago, and Google is far better than it was 5 years ago. The battle encourages each company to create innovative products for the consumer's attention so they can sell advertisements and a whole host of other services to advertisers and consumers alike.
Look at Google's line of web apps - a lot of them compete directly for the low to mid tier users of Microsoft's products in a way that is completely different than anybody on the market, and it's a boon to consumers. Seriously, who would have thought 10 years ago that you could create a document on one computer, edit it on another, and print it from a third without ever having the document on the hard drive? It works so well in most cases that whole businesses are switching to Google's apps from the MS Office line, and they are doing so for far less per-seat than ever.
Does anybody remember email before Gmail? Unless you had your own web server, it was pitiful. 7gb of storage with a 20mb message limit? Seriously? My corporate email has a 150mb total limit and only recently bumped up to a "massive" 15mb message limit. If you have basic arithmatic skills you'll not that 10 maximum sized emails will fill that storage limit. MS was forced to seriously improve hotmail, which used to be plain shitty for the free users (you WISH you got 150mb of storage), but now it reasonably competes with Gmail.
So where are the losers here? Excluding the hits they took from the recession, Google makes more money, Microsoft makes more money, advertisers get better exposure, and the consumers get better service at lower cost. Hell for the folks who hate the ads in Gmail and Hotmail, you can pay a premium to remove them for less than a paid email account cost 10 years ago.
I don't see where anybody lost at all with this arrangement. I see where they had to work harder, but both Google and Microsoft's expansion into new markets shows that they are only growing and improving.
It's not a zero sum game, there is a possibility for everyone to win, and stiff competition is the most efficient way to find it.
I'm assuming you are saying she's an idiot because you've looked at what she actually did for Alaska and not because of the soundbites you're spoonfed from da TeeVee, right?
No?
Everybody says stupid things from time to time, even Obama who is probably the most well-spoken president we've had in 30 years has made some blunders worthy of mockery.
Only a fool would be swayed by eloquence over actions - unfortunately the country is filled with fools.
For the most part only fiction paper-backs are as small as the average e-reader display. Hard-cover books use a format slightly smaller than letter size, and almost all technical books use 8.5x11 or A3 format. The big books are much, much easier to read, and for technical books they can hold graphs and figures that are readable.
Squeezing all that into a paper-back sized e-reader, frankly, sucks. Graphs become hard to read, if it's a software book you have to scroll several pages for each code block which would ordinarily fit on one page, etc. I am very much looking forward to paper-sized readers like Plastic Logic (which was supposed to be out by now, damnit).
In other words, yeah, it's a silly question. It's the same reason most books aren't small paper-backs - only cheap novels are.
Even rocket scientists can be morons - either the Europeans didn't mark their units properly, or the Americans were dumbasses and didn't convert the units and assumed incorrectly. Either way, it's a case of a rocket scientist making a 2nd grade level mistake which cost us billions.
And you wonder why NASA is having trouble getting funding.
How does it feel to be one of the 3 nations of the world who just *have* to be fucking awkward ?
Generally superior, actually, because we know that for the time being all the rest of you losers have to deal with it.
Suckers.
Though, we're working on destroying our economy one obscenely huge bill at a time, and once we're relegated to the sidelines I'm sure there will actually be an advantage to switching, so just be patient my poor, interchangeable European friend. Your time will come again, and you can rub it in our faces when it does.
No, it's cool, see, the OLED toilet paper never makes it down the toilet - the incomming water just washes it off and it's good to go for the next person!
Show the text overlain, then black, then white, then just the new text?
Is that really the reason you don't have one? Or do you secretly want one and are just making excuses? Because that little flash is about as annoying as... turning a page.
God it's horrible, the text goes sideways, then disappears and you can see a page ahead for a fraction of a second, then it's sideways again and you can finally read it. Plus there's that annoying "Shhhh..." sound it makes. UGH! Turning pages is so disgusting!
Seriously man, I'll take my much, much clearer screen and much, much better battery life over instant page turns any day. Unless you're reading a thousand plus words per minute, the quarter second it takes to refresh the page is not annoying at all. Grey-scale LCDs are very low contrast, unlike e-Ink which is virtually the same as paper and ink. That makes them much easier to read on. And if you're reading over a thousand words per minute you probably aren't reading for pleasure anyway, so why are you bothering with the small display of ANY e-reader?
If you DO read that fast, well then, yeah, the page refresh would get pretty damn annoying, but like I said, why would you bother with an e-reader at that point anyway?
There is a reason LCD ebook readers never really took off, even though they are much less expensive than e-Ink readers. If you haven't figured it out, maybe you should try actually reading on one for once. My local Best-Buy has them on display, I'm sure an electronics store near you does as well. Note that I do NOT recommend actually buying a reader from Best-Buy, just to look in person before getting one elsewhere.
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He owned a small accounting firm that went out of business, damnit.
Preview is my friend.
404 doesn't tell you to do anything. It only ask you to show that you have internal controls and that they are deemed sufficient for a company of the type/size you're working for, and that you actually is following your controls.
That's the rub, and that's why this guy is suing. He owned a small accounting firm because, no matter what he did, the SarBox auditor's board determined what he was doing wasn't good enough, and the only changes they would accept would prevent him from turning a profit.
The SarBox board killed a legitimate business that was operating in good-faith compliance.
That's far, far too much power for a bunch of nameless beureaucrats.
Exactly.
Really, two factor authentication only offers meager protection from a subset of attacks, yet I can tell you that implimenting it at each company was probably a $50k project, or, for the less efficient companies, a $200k project.
ROI for Sar-Box is shit. We've got a hell of a lot more expenses for a teeny bit more security.
The sad fact is, it probably WOULD break SarBox compliance, it's frickin retarded.
Just about everything a company does relates to SarBox either directly or indirectly, so often an IT department will become terrified to make the smallest change to avoid inadvertantly breaking compliance, or making a change while staying compliance will require more money than the change is worth.
I.e. if you request a change to save $2000 a month in productivity losses, but maintaining the change will cost $4000 a month, it does not make sense to make the change. Period. SarBox has significantly raised the cost of even minor IT changes that have anything to do with private data (even indirectly).
Not if the fines scale in relation to the amount of information that was lost, and compensatory damages are included requiring payment of the estimated damages for each individual person's data loss (not an average spread to everyone). Of course the individual data evaluations must be done by a firm chosen by the courts, and paid in full by company that lost the data.
It's pretty easy to structure the law such that almost any company will be bankrupted by failing to secure data. That would also be silly, because no company can guarantee that no data will ever be stolen, so if you place the requirements too heavily on the fact that the data went missing, and disregard the amount of effort the company put into keeping the data safe, you could be destroying companies that do not desearve to be destroyed.
Generally, the best way to handle these things is to keep the language of the law vague enough that it can be decided on a case by case basis - i.e. the company did their best to protect their data, and so should recieve little or no punishment.
SarBox is the worst possible solution - it mandates security measures that are ineffective (because in the real world, the mandated measures were obsolete after a few months time) that are expensive to impliment and yield little or no added security.
One visible example is banking - you now have an image tied to your account login to prevent phishing. However, most people don't pay too much attention to it, and wouldn't care if it were different. Or, they'll use it that one time, it doesn't work like it is supposed to (because it's actually at a phishing site), they try again later and now it works (because it is now actualy at the bank website). Since it works, it must have just been some minor hiccup, and all is right with the world. Right? No, they just got their account access stolen, and if a person is smart they'll slowly siphon the money off instead of withdrawing large chunks of cash.
It's also easy to harass someone now, because of the strict regulations if you manage to find someone's account (or at a big bank, just randomly choose numbers) but can't access it, just plug a bunch of gibberish in a few times and they don't have access to their own money. That can be devastating, and it's untraceable if the harasser is using a public terminal.
SarBox aught to have been more vague, and focused on the good faith effort to secure a client's data. People get into trouble when they aren't handling data using the industry's best practices that way, for if the institution never bothered to check what the latest best practices were, they obviously weren't too interested in data security.
Setting it up that way, instead of with complex rules and regulations, give it the flexibility to adapt and apply to each situation, and there is no risk of it ever going obsolete, unlike the current SarBox law.
You heard the man, noone use the Internet until this is done.
I don't see why the Noones weren't allowed to use the internet before, or why they'll have to stop when this is over, but it's nice that you're willing to let them use it a little bit, I guess.
Or perhaps you meant "no one"?
I've just gotten into it, after resisting for years, and honestly the most fun I'm having is playing at the auction house. I've only been playing WoW for a month or so, but in the last week or so I've learned how to work it and earned over 200 gold with a lvl 11 character.
Were I on a medium or heavily populated server I'd have made 2-3 times that much by now, it's great fun. I'm sure I'll get tired of it when I have thousands of gold and nothing to spend it on (due to low level chars), but till then I'm having a ball.
However, any respectable psychologist/neuroscientist knows that you won't be able to explain what colorblindness feels like from looking at an MRI scan or comparing results on a color discrimination task.
A grad student physicist, however, will not (well, a reasonable one might).
That's the point.
I think you missed his point. Neurology and Psychology may be drawn closer together by a better understanding of the physical workings of the brain, but in no way, shape, or form has Neurology helped a Psychologist understand what a person with a particular brain malfunction actually feels.
That's the point he was trying to make, I think. While certain aspects of the fields which DO overlap become more meshed together, it's becoming clearer that Neurology will never take the place of Psychology, or vice versa. The thought was that the more we understood the physical workings of the brain, the more we'd understand its abstract workings. The GP is saying this is not bearing out.
I really have no idea myself, but it makes some sense to me.
2500 expert reviewers, sure, but only a few hundred people did the original research, everyone else just said "yup yup, looks good to me".
There really aren't all that many people who go out into the boonies and collect data, and even if there WERE 2500 scientists doing field work, that's still ridiculously low for the kind of influence these people have over climate-change legislation.
We aren't funding good research, we're just using the shot gun method to fix something that we aren't entirely sure we've broken (and spending far, far more than good research would cost). In our own human history over the last few thousand years we have had ice ages and periods of almost universaly tropical temperatures, both much higher and much lower than we currently see now. Many of the long-term temperature studies (ice cores, tree cores, etc) are susceptible to bias, both intentional and unintentional.
It would be really nice if we had definitive evidence that humans are contributing a major portion of the warming that we see, but instead all we have are correlations. Everybody likes to point out the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation, but we seem to forget that when talking about global warming. Hell, twenty years ago all the scientists were saying we were headed for a new ice age if we don't change our ways!
Seriously, the data to me seems far, far to sparse and inconsistant to draw any meaningful conclusions. You can build all the models you want, but if your data sucks it isn't going to do you any good.
But I argue that aluminum is not a naturally occurring substance...
Then I'd argue you're a moron. Aluminum is what is commonly known as a basic element. It's not a compound of anything, it isn't created in a lab, it's dug up out of the earth.
Now, I'll agree with your point that getting it into a useable form requires processing, but so do algae pellets, bio fuel, orange juice and that nice, tasty steak. You seem to be implying that there is no such thing as a naturally occurring substance, which is obviously false.
Furthermore, aluminum is extremely recyclable, and can be recovered with only 5% of the energy costs of the initial refinement. The more aluminum we refine the more we have available for recycling, so while it is extremely expensive, the total energy cost of aluminum does not go up linearly with our aluminum consumption. Also, one of the primary goals of the industry is reducing the cost of refinement, which is directly related to the energy consumption and environmental impact.
So yeah, aluminum is costly monetarily and environmentally on the front end, but it has a very long back end re-useability that makes it much much cheaper in the long run.
Volatile, particularly when refering to explosive material, means unstable. Nitro-glycerin is volatile, TNT is less so even though they have a similar explosiveness (TNT is made from nitro-glycerin). Volatility has nothing to do with explosiveness, though a lot of extremely volatile substances (like nitro-glycerin) explosive precisely because they are so volatile.
Atoms are absolutely non-volatile, but if you can manage to split one - BOOOOM!!
You essentially said "Hard to light? It is extremely easy to light, just hard to light." That doesn't make any sense.
See the problem? It's very energetic, even explosive, but it isn't volatile.
The point is that while Aluminum is plentiful in our solar system, water is not - though there would be enough for most purposes should we need to land and collect. When you get outside of our solar system, the prospect is even grimmer. There is Aluminum almost everywhere you go in the Universe, but water is rare.
Still, one space ship would only need to find a relatively miniscule amount to re-fuel.
I remember thinking there was something inherent about PC hardware that meant you had to reboot in order to change IP address...
I recently had to repair a network filled with Win98 boxes and a Win2000 server, and OH MY GOD was it annoying! Sure, you can do DHCP, no problem, just need a quick reboot... Oh, you expected me to pick up the DNS via DHCP too? Sorry Charlie, that has to be set manually. No worries though, just punch in the IP addresses and give it a quick reboot... What's that? Something is wrong with the DHCP and you need a new IP address? No worries, just punch in the new one and give it a quick reboot...
Note that a "quick reboot" took at least 5-10 minutes. A two minute job in XP, with brain farts, took a half hour or more in Win98. Frustrating to no end, I don't know how we survived.
That is ridiculous, the only way Wal-Mart (or anybody else) can get the cheapest goods possible is by constantly seeking better deals. They are the ultimate cheapskate, true, but if you've ever actually been to Wal-Mart you'll notice they have a large selection of items in every category. Every cheap supplier out there is competing for a space on Wal-Mart's shelves, and this induces massive amounts of competition at the bottom level.
...leads to everybody concentrating on fewer "models" whose quality decreases as an unavoidable consequence of the price war, which means that after a while you can only get it in "medium" and it breaks or wears out quickly.
That was probably the worst example you could possibly give. Wal-Mart is one of the few places that sells clothes in everything from the most petite sizes on up to 3-4x big&tall. The people who shop at Wal-Mart, particularly for clothes, tend to be more interested in durability than style, and so Wal-Mart clothes tend to out-last any medium quality pair of clothes at much higher prices.
Go to Wal-Mart and look for a pair of men's jeans. You'll almost certainly find them in sizes up to 54" for under $30. Good, thick material too. Now go visit Abercrombie - you'll be hard pressed to find a pair of pants of any kind bigger than 42", you'll pay $100 or more for them, and they will be pre-worn, which makes them flimsy and not last nearly as long. This follows for pretty much all mid to high-end retailer of clothes.
So who is creating fewer "models" to choose from? You won't find a good pair of work clothes at American Eagle or Gap, and if you do happen to they are made for style not substance - you'd never want to actually do work in them. If you do happen to destroy your Wal-Mart work clothes, well, you can buy four of them for what you would have paid at another store, so who's losing out here? It's certainly not the Wal-Mart shopper.
Wal-Mart sells the high quality stuff that their customers want. They sell it at the cheapest price they can. And when the customer cares more about price than quality (which is usually the case for Wal-Mart shoppers), Wal-Mart seeks the cheapest prices possible. It is the customer's desires that determine the selection at Wal-Mart, if they don't care to have six different brands of jeans in twelve different styles, Wal-Mart is not going to stock it. Yet, they do to the degree that their customers purchase them, as you can find most of the styles the pricier stores carry at Wal-Mart for much less.
The only people that are going to want a "free google 'welfarebook' with your 24-month wireless internet data contract - some conditions apply, yadda yadda yadda rip-off contract" will be those who can't come up with $200. Far from "do no evil", this will be "gouge the poor."
I don't see how you can call providing a free $200 device to use a service they want anyway as "gouging". Sounds like a damn good deal to me. It's going to cost them around $600 a year to connect to the internet anyway, how is offering a portable service plus a $200 device "gouging"?
Nobody needs a portable laptop with wireless internet. People want such a thing, but people also want Ferraris. You can hardly say Ferrari gouges the poor because their cars are so expensive. It would be especially hard to argue that Microsoft gouges the poor by offering to lease a $1 million car for $1k per month if you agree to drive it around with their logo on the side for as long as you kept the car. I WISH they would do such a thing, everybody would be able to drive Ferraris then!
That's pretty much what you're calling "gouging" here. It doesn't make any sense.
Do you even understand what gouging is? It's certainly not bundling all kinds of free goodies with a service, that's basically the opposite of what gouging is. Gouging is when you know consumers MUST buy your product, so you jack the price up far more than it costs to produce the product and offer a low level of service. It's pretty much impossible to "gouge" on a product that people don't need to buy at all. It usually happens with things like utilities, gas, groceries, and other regular necessary consumables.
Until applications and data are built on completely open standards -- interoperable with ANY capable device -- this multiple OS business is just a hassle for consumers.
You haven't been paying much attention to where the technology is going, have you? As it stands right now, any program written for .Net that relies on the built-in namespaces instead of Windows specific API calls will run on Linux or Mac with the Mono CLI. That's the direction MS is moving, and they are the Giant Evil Corporation(tm) who is most likely to fight this sort of change. They have to move this direction, however, or else be passed by in the open movement that is going on.
Linux products like Wine and Crossover have been bridging the gap for years, and OS virtualization is becoming ubiquitous. It is possible right now to run any application on any computer with just a little bit of work, and it is only going to get easier in the future.
Wake up and smell the coffe man, what you want is exactly what the multi-OS competition is driving towards. Without this "hassle", nothing would happen at all, and you'd still get to complain forever. I'm sure that's all you really want, is something to complain about.
For instance, what if your a business traveler who spends a lot of time flying,
You know they have the internet on airplanes now, right?
...or when your drunk neighbor hits the cable box with this truck and your stuck without internet for a week.
Has this actually ever happened to you? And if you are so unlucky, has it ever happened more than once? It's probably far more common to forget to backup your data and have a hard drive failure, in fact I'm pretty sure it is. It's almost impossible for your drunk neighbor to hit the cable box in most situations, as they generally aren't placed in an area where people will be driving too incredibly close to. At least in my experience, anyway.
I'd be more worried about the power outage that ruins the drive with all your data on it, and have to spend $3k to maybe get it back.
Exactly, and I see it as a very good thing.
I personally don't mind ads, especially Google's ads (which are apparently far more effective than the ugly banner ads). Most of the time I don't see them, and I'll gladly take free + ads over a paid service in almost every case.
For example, if I could get free cell phone service by agreeing to the occasional text advertisement or a banner on the background I'd jump at it. That would save me $80 per month, it's a huge value to me. If I get sick and tired of the ads, or I get a raise and the $80 savings is less of a deal, I might pay for the service to remove them.
The fact is, the Microsoft/Google battle has been very good for consumers. Bing, while not as good as Google yet IMO, is ten times better than searches were 5 years ago, and Google is far better than it was 5 years ago. The battle encourages each company to create innovative products for the consumer's attention so they can sell advertisements and a whole host of other services to advertisers and consumers alike.
Look at Google's line of web apps - a lot of them compete directly for the low to mid tier users of Microsoft's products in a way that is completely different than anybody on the market, and it's a boon to consumers. Seriously, who would have thought 10 years ago that you could create a document on one computer, edit it on another, and print it from a third without ever having the document on the hard drive? It works so well in most cases that whole businesses are switching to Google's apps from the MS Office line, and they are doing so for far less per-seat than ever.
Does anybody remember email before Gmail? Unless you had your own web server, it was pitiful. 7gb of storage with a 20mb message limit? Seriously? My corporate email has a 150mb total limit and only recently bumped up to a "massive" 15mb message limit. If you have basic arithmatic skills you'll not that 10 maximum sized emails will fill that storage limit. MS was forced to seriously improve hotmail, which used to be plain shitty for the free users (you WISH you got 150mb of storage), but now it reasonably competes with Gmail.
So where are the losers here? Excluding the hits they took from the recession, Google makes more money, Microsoft makes more money, advertisers get better exposure, and the consumers get better service at lower cost. Hell for the folks who hate the ads in Gmail and Hotmail, you can pay a premium to remove them for less than a paid email account cost 10 years ago.
I don't see where anybody lost at all with this arrangement. I see where they had to work harder, but both Google and Microsoft's expansion into new markets shows that they are only growing and improving.
It's not a zero sum game, there is a possibility for everyone to win, and stiff competition is the most efficient way to find it.
I'm assuming you are saying she's an idiot because you've looked at what she actually did for Alaska and not because of the soundbites you're spoonfed from da TeeVee, right?
No?
Everybody says stupid things from time to time, even Obama who is probably the most well-spoken president we've had in 30 years has made some blunders worthy of mockery.
Only a fool would be swayed by eloquence over actions - unfortunately the country is filled with fools.
For the most part only fiction paper-backs are as small as the average e-reader display. Hard-cover books use a format slightly smaller than letter size, and almost all technical books use 8.5x11 or A3 format. The big books are much, much easier to read, and for technical books they can hold graphs and figures that are readable.
Squeezing all that into a paper-back sized e-reader, frankly, sucks. Graphs become hard to read, if it's a software book you have to scroll several pages for each code block which would ordinarily fit on one page, etc. I am very much looking forward to paper-sized readers like Plastic Logic (which was supposed to be out by now, damnit).
In other words, yeah, it's a silly question. It's the same reason most books aren't small paper-backs - only cheap novels are.
Even rocket scientists can be morons - either the Europeans didn't mark their units properly, or the Americans were dumbasses and didn't convert the units and assumed incorrectly. Either way, it's a case of a rocket scientist making a 2nd grade level mistake which cost us billions.
And you wonder why NASA is having trouble getting funding.
How does it feel to be one of the 3 nations of the world who just *have* to be fucking awkward ?
Generally superior, actually, because we know that for the time being all the rest of you losers have to deal with it.
Suckers.
Though, we're working on destroying our economy one obscenely huge bill at a time, and once we're relegated to the sidelines I'm sure there will actually be an advantage to switching, so just be patient my poor, interchangeable European friend. Your time will come again, and you can rub it in our faces when it does.
- Your Smug American Neighbor
No, it's cool, see, the OLED toilet paper never makes it down the toilet - the incomming water just washes it off and it's good to go for the next person!
Sterilization? Who needs that?!
Show the text overlain, then black, then white, then just the new text?
Is that really the reason you don't have one? Or do you secretly want one and are just making excuses? Because that little flash is about as annoying as... turning a page.
God it's horrible, the text goes sideways, then disappears and you can see a page ahead for a fraction of a second, then it's sideways again and you can finally read it. Plus there's that annoying "Shhhh..." sound it makes. UGH! Turning pages is so disgusting!
Seriously man, I'll take my much, much clearer screen and much, much better battery life over instant page turns any day. Unless you're reading a thousand plus words per minute, the quarter second it takes to refresh the page is not annoying at all. Grey-scale LCDs are very low contrast, unlike e-Ink which is virtually the same as paper and ink. That makes them much easier to read on. And if you're reading over a thousand words per minute you probably aren't reading for pleasure anyway, so why are you bothering with the small display of ANY e-reader?
If you DO read that fast, well then, yeah, the page refresh would get pretty damn annoying, but like I said, why would you bother with an e-reader at that point anyway?
There is a reason LCD ebook readers never really took off, even though they are much less expensive than e-Ink readers. If you haven't figured it out, maybe you should try actually reading on one for once. My local Best-Buy has them on display, I'm sure an electronics store near you does as well. Note that I do NOT recommend actually buying a reader from Best-Buy, just to look in person before getting one elsewhere.