This is exactly why I switched from Linux back to Vista (I went from Vista to Linux initially because of hardware issues). I wanted to love Linux, I think at it's core it is a fantastic OS, and I'm all about free.
But I'm not a programmer, I've got very, very mediocre artistic abilities, and my attempts to pretty up just my desktop experience didn't produce anything I could continue with. I couldn't find a "theme" I liked, and they didn't fix a lot of the other UI issues, like not being able to change a number of settings via the GUI. In windows and OSX, cli is reserved for when things have gone very wrong, or you are trying to do very power-user level stuff, not everyday things like adjusting sound settings or installing programs that aren't in your distro's repository.
Basically, if Linux on the desktop looked as nice as OSX and the user rarely needed to go to the CLI for anything it would be crushing OSX and be solidly competing with Windows. That's my estimation, anyway.
I dare you to name a language option offered by Ubuntu that Windows doesn't have. I'd be far more inclined to believe Windows has languages that Ubuntu doesn't.
To further refute your idiotic point, China has one of the highest, if not THE highest, rates of Windows piracy in the world, and yet there has been a Chinese language option for a decade or more.
I wish I had mod points, that post deserves a +5 insightful.
The defense has just as much right to exclude a juror as the plaintiff, which means the plaintiff can't "stack" the jury unless the defendant is incompetant.
Also, I have been on a jury, you don't get a copy of the law in question, that would be foolish. The judge explains the criteria for violation of the law, and the jury's job is determine guilt based on the key points of the law. It's usually something along the lines of "If you determine X, Y, and Z are true, find the defendant guilty." Lawyers have to go to school for years to BEGIN to make heads or tails of the law, do you realy want ignorant citizens arguing the finer points of the law in the deliberation room? I don't. And 99% of non lawyers, including the GP, are quite ignorant of the law.
I definitely don't agree with the verdict in this case, and I have a lot of respect for NewYorkCountryLawyer, but armchair lawyers are worse than armchair quarterbacks. The GP has definitely fallen for this, and I think NYCL has as well in this case.
BTW, in case the GP didn't know, thanks to iTunes and Amazon et all, the "single" is more popular than ever.
Lawyers only get a limited number of "rejections" in a court case, they don't get to go through and reject anyone they don't like - that would violate the right to trial by a jury of your peers. They have to be careful about who they pick, and if they have a concern about someone they generally all go into a back room - sometimes with the proposed juror - and discuss the issue before deciding.
So no, the odds are not extremely good, I am very surprised that there was apparently nobody on the jury who had a clue, or who thought such fines were outrageous. The jury actually RAISED the fines - the RIAA was not asking for $80,000 per song.
Frankly, I don't understand it, she must have done something to piss off the entire jury.
I don't think the framers of the Constitution could have fathomed a $1.9 million award for a case that was not, and could never be, criminal copyright infringement.
That was the primary purpose of the copyright provision in the constitution - to prevent other people from profiting off of your work by copying it and then selling it.
To make a comparison to what the RIAA is doing, it's like getting hit with an $80,000 fine for taking a picture of a painting in a museum, or even photo-copying a picture of a painting from a book. It is insanity.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, that's why they call it copyright infringement. It is not theft.
Also, there is criminal copyright infringement which carries stiff penalties (loss of assets, major fines, jail time), but they require someone profiting financially off of copyright infringement - a commercial level copying operation. Since digital copying is almost never a commercial operation, the record companies must settle for civil court.
It's also a hell of a lot easier to prove their case in civil court than criminal, so they aren't even looking for criminal copyright infringement unless it is a major operation. I don't think they could get a bigger judgement than this in a criminal case anyway.
A band can expect an average of $1.00 in royalties for each full-priced ($16.98) CD sold through normal retail channels... Did I say the band was going to actually receive royalties? Not so fast. The other major concept involved in record contracts is the term "recoupment". Recoupment is a fancy word for pay back. Record companies expend a lot of money on bands. They pay for all the studio time, give the band an advance, promote the band, etc. All of this money is a loan to the band which the band must pay back. This is recoupment.
The rate on a retail sale is the highest rate you'll get, anything outside retail is at a further reduced rate. Also, essentially all costs to produce, promote, and publish the album are paid by the artist out of the $1 per album. Labels pull in $15 per retail album in almost pure profit off of the artist. All this for a chance to become popular enough to make it big. I can't say for sure, but I'd wager iTunes $10 albums are not considered part of traditional retail, and so have a reduced royalty rate.
Top selling artists don't make much of anything on retail sales. They make money by packing stadiums and selling 10,000 tickets at $80 a pop. For all intents and purposes, albums are nothing more than a promotional tool for concerts. If artists could live well off royalties concerts would be much less common. Only a few can do this, and they usually have very large catalogues of well-selling music, i.e. they have paid their recoupments and get to keep their $1 per album.
That's why everybody needs to be a proponent of capitalism.;)
Come to the dark side! We have cookies!
Srsly though, it's better than anything else. Russia and China are both shining examples that socialism can't survive without some measure of capitalism (Communist China survived by scaling back Communism in time, the USSR did not). Europe is more socialistic than the US in most ways, but is still quite heavy with capitalism. It's capitalism with social constraints.
I dunno, it looks like the #3 result on the google search to me, and the quote looks like a direct quote from the blog.
Also, through the entire blog you say h.264 is superior to theora after performing your own subjective tests.
I'm not sure what is dishonest about the quote. It's a completely accurate and relevant statement, since the GP was not referencing any specific test and only said "most tests", your own non-scientific test is probably exactly the type of test the GP was talking about. The GP also said these tests show Theora as superior, and they do not. Everything I have seen shows Theora at slightly lower quality and less efficient compression for the same bitrate.
It is encouraging that it is getting close though.
No they aren't, there is no such thing as a javascript virtual machine, the language isn't built that way. What our browsers do is act as a javascript interpreter, which is entirely different. You wouldn't say web browsers are HTML virtual machines, because they aren't. They are HTML interpreters. Javascript is much more closely related to HTML than either of them are to Java. The two have more in common with a language like Python, which is also an interpreted language.
Java is more like a bastardized hybrid of compiled and interpreted languages.
All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.
Not really, it's central to their problem. You would be absolutely correct to say that news stories are not the product for a newspaper. Neither is advertisement space though, not completely. The product is the eyes of readers on that ad space. The more eyes they have the more valuable the ad space, and the more they can charge for classifieds and advertisements.
If bloggers can produce a similar quality product to newsprint articles and can put more eyes on the ad-space or provide the same number of eyes for less money, advertisers will start choosing bloggers instead of newspapers. This devalues the adspace, which means they cannot sell the space for as much, and they lose money.
Therefore, maintaining the perception (true or not, I personally think it is valid but not universaly true) that trained journalists offer more reliable high quality news than "amature" bloggers is of critical importance. It's not a sideshow, it is the core of their business model, and without it newspapers are little more than penny-saver ad periodicals.
There are no ads, classified, comics, crosswords, sudokus, or horoscopes.
Seriously? I would think leaving those out would be a huge mistake, except for maybe crosswords and sudokus, those would be hard - but maybe worth it in the end.
No wonder they don't like these new distribution models, they're not pushing their advertising to them! Just throw them up for free until you work out a new pricing model or whatever (shouldn't really change though). People love the classifieds and comics, and classifieds and ads are how the newspapers make money.
I'd go for that, but I'd rather it were $1000 sick. Anything that actually costs less than $1000 you pay for the whole bill. Anything over $1000 you don't pay beyond the $1000.
If you can't pay up front, that's fine, there would be payment plans. If for some reason you can't pay even that, you go through some sort of verification process and the whole thing is free.
Work in some sort of free yearly checkups to determine any necessary preventative care - plus say a highly reduced fee for followup if further care is recommended, and I'd say you've got a winning package.
The malpractice system should primarily punish bad doctors - some sliding scale of sanctions up to barring from practice. If a state doctor permanently disables a patient and it is determined to be malpractice, the state pays continuing medical expenses (they would anyway) plus the national average wage in compensation per year.
Sucks for some, but it treats everyone fairly. There should always be the option of paying extra to move ahead in line (I imagine another graduated scale of fees for higher priority), however each time a person is skipped in the queue their priority level should raise, so nobody sits and waits forever. Look at TCP/IP network quality of service methodologies for an example that works.
That's the BigJeff5 Healthcare Plan, I think it would work alright. Probably better than what we have now anyway.
Yeah! Retirement savings were so much more efficient before Social Security! Sure, it meant lots of old people ended up begging on the streets, but those people didn't have any money by then, so they didn't count against the efficiency!
Ahh, so it's your right to force me to pay for someone else's irresponsibility? Thanks for that.
And before you yell "Great Depression", things went to shit for -everybody-, forcing the working people who could barely feed their families to pay for the older population was not only unfair, it was cruel. The only thing that was fortunate at the time was that the baby boom hadn't happened yet, and the working population could support their elderly via this inefficient program after the economy started to recover.
The New Deal did bring about some good changes, but Social Security was not one of them. It has been constantly abused by Congress, and it has grown topheavy and is no longer viable. It should have never happened in the first place.
It's unpopular among the younger people who can see that there likely be nothing left in the system by the time it's their turn, but among older people it is extremely popular.
The 55+ year old portion of the population is what has primarily stopped social security reform. They happen to be a very large voting block, and it is hard to get past them. The people in this block either are currently drawing social security or will be drawing it soon, so they certainly don't want to remove it. Also, people in this category tend to be more active voters than other categories, so even politicians who may otherwise be amiable to removing or revamping Social Security won't dare touch the subject.
It's a self perpetuating problem; more people are drawing social security than can be supported by the younger workforce. These people rely on it, and so will adamantly fight anything that jeopardizes that income (imagine if the government tried to slash your paycheck, and how adamantly you'd fight that, it's the same from their perspective). Combine them with idealogues who can't see past their ideology to see that the system is unsustainable and WILL crash at some point in the near future, and you've got a voting base that is nigh unsurmountable.
The fact is, there are more people who are pro Social Security, at least more people who vote anyway, than there are anti Social Security. This is pretty much the definition of Popular.
What we need is a welfare reform that fixes the problem without harming the people who currently rely on the system, or those who are currently expecting to be able to use those funds in the near future.
I believe it is doable, but a plan hasn't so far been presented in a way that it reassures the people at the highest risk.
It is well established that the most efficient use of the processor is "bursting" - heavy usage for short periods followed by long periods of idle. This is, in fact how most OS's work, or at least try to.
Furthermore, unless when you say "doing things" you mean video encoding and compression, or something similarly intensive, you are probably not normally going much above idle for any extended period of time. If your CPU is pegged at 100% for long periods of time, it is an indication of a problem.
Take a look at your running processes in Task Manager or your OSX or Linux equivalent to see what I mean. You'll see the CPU at 1% for the majority of the time, with it occasionally jumping up.
Because of the amount of time the OS idles, the key to battery life is minimizing power consumption at idle and maximizing the speed it completes tasks (to get it back to idle as fast as possible).
The perfect system would not be noticeably different in power from a wasteful system, yet would have significant battery life.
SSD's consume a lot less power than HDD's, couple your expanded battery capacity with aggressive power management and you might even be able to get more out of it.
WiFi is probably the next huge power sink after the hard drive, turning that off with the physical switch when you aren't actively browsing would squeeze more juice out of your laptop.
How does one ensure the integrity of a bio filter system at a random University?
Here's a hint: You don't. There aren't heavy regulations on this stuff until it gets to the point of mass productionf or public consumption. There are standard practices for safety and such, but these aren't government regulated and can very to a degree among institutions and among researchers.
There are no regulations regarding home chemistry aside from the control of some classes of chemicals and some types of equipment. There are a hell of a lot of regulations regarding releasing medical products for mass consumption. Just putting a "cure" for anything out on the market without going through federal processes is a good way to incur heavy fines have your equipment siezed, probably even some jail time.
That's where the check is, and that's where it needs to stay. Nothing needs to be done with DIY bio-engineered product X until it is ready for mass consumption. At that point, one could likely sell their idea to a major corp, or perhaps get donations to support it, and get it pushed through the propper FDA vetting and safety processes.
I don't know that I've ever heard of an open source virus (could be wrong), if there really aren't that completely disproves your point. If all viruses were open source, they wouldn't exist.
However, open source software tends to be well maintained when it is widely used. You could equate the transperancy that allows for that with the ethics question in bio-engineering. Though, it will be dictated largely by popular pressure, which isn't always the best.
What's REALLY funny, as another commenter pointed out earlier, is that every company he complains about started as some guy with an idea and a garage about 10-20 years ago! Talk about raising the barrier to entry!
Google did not exist in the early 90's, some guys with a great idea for a search algorithm started a search engine in their garage (or maybe basement, I don't remember). People started saying "Hey, this is kinda cool", and it grew, and as it grew so did it's influence, and eventually the Mega-Corp Google (actually on the small end of mega-corp) was born.
Amazon, same thing, some guy in his garage said "I can't afford to open a book shop, I know, I'll sell books on the internet!". It started small, and grew, and now Amazon sells -everything- and keeps market prices down while doing so because of his business model.
Doctoro seems to be forming his opinion by closing his eyes to the last 15 years of the Internet. Well, 15 years is not a long time, and in that time we've seen entire markets shaken up by the continually lowering barrier to entry - just look at the newspapers going through the same thing now.
Google and Amazon may be gatekeepers, but it's the back gate they are keeping, and they've been propping it open. If they try to close it now, an enterprising individual will simply find a new gate to prop open.
The original article is just an oh-so-typical piece of American thinking, wherein money and market are the ultimate movers of everything.
It's not typical here, it is common, but not typical. It's also true, in a sense. Power is the ultimate mover of everything - he who has it has substantial control over his surroundings. The more power one has, the more control he has.
In the modern world, Money buys Power. More Money = more Power, more Power = more Control. Therefore, more Money = more Control. It's not some crazy irrational thought process, it's a truth of the modern world. There are parts of the world where money has less of a connection to power and control, these are mostly second and third world countries. In the West, money and power are practically interchangeable terms.
Also, culture does not last. Look at fall of the great civilizations in history - the Babolonians, the Persians, the Romans, etc. Precious little culture, compared to what they produced, has survived. The reason Picasso's painting is worth millions of dollars on the market is because very few paintings from just the last century or two exist. In another century or two, Picasso will probably be just a footnote in a textbook, with maybe an example of his work in a file somewhere. The orginal will likely be lost by then.
Lastly, well run corporations have shown they can survive for hundreds of years - there are a number of wine and liquor makers who have been around since the 1700's for example. Most die though, eventually. Nothing lasts.
I know the beowulf cluster is cool and all, but come on now, you're starting to lose geek cred for inaccuracy here. Beowulf clusters are whole machines clustered to act as one - so you can have a beowulf cluster of Wii's, PS3's, and Barbara Streisands, but not a beowulf cluster of Phenom IIs.
Besides, I thought it was assload of CPUs in a GPU package, not the other way around? Intel makes damn good CPUs, no matter how much their GPUs suck (they are adequate, but only for very small values of adequate).
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I've never been able to make a change with Network Connections that ever stuck, so I quit bothering.
This is exactly why I switched from Linux back to Vista (I went from Vista to Linux initially because of hardware issues). I wanted to love Linux, I think at it's core it is a fantastic OS, and I'm all about free.
But I'm not a programmer, I've got very, very mediocre artistic abilities, and my attempts to pretty up just my desktop experience didn't produce anything I could continue with. I couldn't find a "theme" I liked, and they didn't fix a lot of the other UI issues, like not being able to change a number of settings via the GUI. In windows and OSX, cli is reserved for when things have gone very wrong, or you are trying to do very power-user level stuff, not everyday things like adjusting sound settings or installing programs that aren't in your distro's repository.
Basically, if Linux on the desktop looked as nice as OSX and the user rarely needed to go to the CLI for anything it would be crushing OSX and be solidly competing with Windows. That's my estimation, anyway.
I dare you to name a language option offered by Ubuntu that Windows doesn't have. I'd be far more inclined to believe Windows has languages that Ubuntu doesn't.
To further refute your idiotic point, China has one of the highest, if not THE highest, rates of Windows piracy in the world, and yet there has been a Chinese language option for a decade or more.
Cheers :)
I wish I had mod points, that post deserves a +5 insightful.
The defense has just as much right to exclude a juror as the plaintiff, which means the plaintiff can't "stack" the jury unless the defendant is incompetant.
Also, I have been on a jury, you don't get a copy of the law in question, that would be foolish. The judge explains the criteria for violation of the law, and the jury's job is determine guilt based on the key points of the law. It's usually something along the lines of "If you determine X, Y, and Z are true, find the defendant guilty." Lawyers have to go to school for years to BEGIN to make heads or tails of the law, do you realy want ignorant citizens arguing the finer points of the law in the deliberation room? I don't. And 99% of non lawyers, including the GP, are quite ignorant of the law.
I definitely don't agree with the verdict in this case, and I have a lot of respect for NewYorkCountryLawyer, but armchair lawyers are worse than armchair quarterbacks. The GP has definitely fallen for this, and I think NYCL has as well in this case.
BTW, in case the GP didn't know, thanks to iTunes and Amazon et all, the "single" is more popular than ever.
Lawyers only get a limited number of "rejections" in a court case, they don't get to go through and reject anyone they don't like - that would violate the right to trial by a jury of your peers. They have to be careful about who they pick, and if they have a concern about someone they generally all go into a back room - sometimes with the proposed juror - and discuss the issue before deciding.
So no, the odds are not extremely good, I am very surprised that there was apparently nobody on the jury who had a clue, or who thought such fines were outrageous. The jury actually RAISED the fines - the RIAA was not asking for $80,000 per song.
Frankly, I don't understand it, she must have done something to piss off the entire jury.
I don't think the framers of the Constitution could have fathomed a $1.9 million award for a case that was not, and could never be, criminal copyright infringement.
That was the primary purpose of the copyright provision in the constitution - to prevent other people from profiting off of your work by copying it and then selling it.
To make a comparison to what the RIAA is doing, it's like getting hit with an $80,000 fine for taking a picture of a painting in a museum, or even photo-copying a picture of a painting from a book. It is insanity.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, that's why they call it copyright infringement. It is not theft.
Also, there is criminal copyright infringement which carries stiff penalties (loss of assets, major fines, jail time), but they require someone profiting financially off of copyright infringement - a commercial level copying operation. Since digital copying is almost never a commercial operation, the record companies must settle for civil court.
It's also a hell of a lot easier to prove their case in civil court than criminal, so they aren't even looking for criminal copyright infringement unless it is a major operation. I don't think they could get a bigger judgement than this in a criminal case anyway.
If there were no RIAA, then artists might realize little from the digital distribution of their work.
It is because of the RIAA and its member companies that artists realize little to no profit from album sales, especially new artists.
From an article explaining record contracts:
A band can expect an average of $1.00 in royalties for each full-priced ($16.98) CD sold through normal retail channels... Did I say the band was going to actually receive royalties? Not so fast. The other major concept involved in record contracts is the term "recoupment". Recoupment is a fancy word for pay back. Record companies expend a lot of money on bands. They pay for all the studio time, give the band an advance, promote the band, etc. All of this money is a loan to the band which the band must pay back. This is recoupment.
The rate on a retail sale is the highest rate you'll get, anything outside retail is at a further reduced rate. Also, essentially all costs to produce, promote, and publish the album are paid by the artist out of the $1 per album. Labels pull in $15 per retail album in almost pure profit off of the artist. All this for a chance to become popular enough to make it big. I can't say for sure, but I'd wager iTunes $10 albums are not considered part of traditional retail, and so have a reduced royalty rate.
Top selling artists don't make much of anything on retail sales. They make money by packing stadiums and selling 10,000 tickets at $80 a pop. For all intents and purposes, albums are nothing more than a promotional tool for concerts. If artists could live well off royalties concerts would be much less common. Only a few can do this, and they usually have very large catalogues of well-selling music, i.e. they have paid their recoupments and get to keep their $1 per album.
That's why everybody needs to be a proponent of capitalism. ;)
Come to the dark side! We have cookies!
Srsly though, it's better than anything else. Russia and China are both shining examples that socialism can't survive without some measure of capitalism (Communist China survived by scaling back Communism in time, the USSR did not). Europe is more socialistic than the US in most ways, but is still quite heavy with capitalism. It's capitalism with social constraints.
WTF?
I'm not happy with Obama either, but WTF does this have to do with the RIAA v. Thomas case?
I dunno, it looks like the #3 result on the google search to me, and the quote looks like a direct quote from the blog.
Also, through the entire blog you say h.264 is superior to theora after performing your own subjective tests.
I'm not sure what is dishonest about the quote. It's a completely accurate and relevant statement, since the GP was not referencing any specific test and only said "most tests", your own non-scientific test is probably exactly the type of test the GP was talking about. The GP also said these tests show Theora as superior, and they do not. Everything I have seen shows Theora at slightly lower quality and less efficient compression for the same bitrate.
It is encouraging that it is getting close though.
Our browsers are javascript virtual machines.
No they aren't, there is no such thing as a javascript virtual machine, the language isn't built that way. What our browsers do is act as a javascript interpreter, which is entirely different. You wouldn't say web browsers are HTML virtual machines, because they aren't. They are HTML interpreters. Javascript is much more closely related to HTML than either of them are to Java. The two have more in common with a language like Python, which is also an interpreted language.
Java is more like a bastardized hybrid of compiled and interpreted languages.
All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.
Not really, it's central to their problem. You would be absolutely correct to say that news stories are not the product for a newspaper. Neither is advertisement space though, not completely. The product is the eyes of readers on that ad space. The more eyes they have the more valuable the ad space, and the more they can charge for classifieds and advertisements.
If bloggers can produce a similar quality product to newsprint articles and can put more eyes on the ad-space or provide the same number of eyes for less money, advertisers will start choosing bloggers instead of newspapers. This devalues the adspace, which means they cannot sell the space for as much, and they lose money.
Therefore, maintaining the perception (true or not, I personally think it is valid but not universaly true) that trained journalists offer more reliable high quality news than "amature" bloggers is of critical importance. It's not a sideshow, it is the core of their business model, and without it newspapers are little more than penny-saver ad periodicals.
There are no ads, classified, comics, crosswords, sudokus, or horoscopes.
Seriously? I would think leaving those out would be a huge mistake, except for maybe crosswords and sudokus, those would be hard - but maybe worth it in the end.
No wonder they don't like these new distribution models, they're not pushing their advertising to them! Just throw them up for free until you work out a new pricing model or whatever (shouldn't really change though). People love the classifieds and comics, and classifieds and ads are how the newspapers make money.
I'd go for that, but I'd rather it were $1000 sick. Anything that actually costs less than $1000 you pay for the whole bill. Anything over $1000 you don't pay beyond the $1000.
If you can't pay up front, that's fine, there would be payment plans. If for some reason you can't pay even that, you go through some sort of verification process and the whole thing is free.
Work in some sort of free yearly checkups to determine any necessary preventative care - plus say a highly reduced fee for followup if further care is recommended, and I'd say you've got a winning package.
The malpractice system should primarily punish bad doctors - some sliding scale of sanctions up to barring from practice. If a state doctor permanently disables a patient and it is determined to be malpractice, the state pays continuing medical expenses (they would anyway) plus the national average wage in compensation per year.
Sucks for some, but it treats everyone fairly. There should always be the option of paying extra to move ahead in line (I imagine another graduated scale of fees for higher priority), however each time a person is skipped in the queue their priority level should raise, so nobody sits and waits forever. Look at TCP/IP network quality of service methodologies for an example that works.
That's the BigJeff5 Healthcare Plan, I think it would work alright. Probably better than what we have now anyway.
Yeah! Retirement savings were so much more efficient before Social Security! Sure, it meant lots of old people ended up begging on the streets, but those people didn't have any money by then, so they didn't count against the efficiency!
Ahh, so it's your right to force me to pay for someone else's irresponsibility? Thanks for that.
And before you yell "Great Depression", things went to shit for -everybody-, forcing the working people who could barely feed their families to pay for the older population was not only unfair, it was cruel. The only thing that was fortunate at the time was that the baby boom hadn't happened yet, and the working population could support their elderly via this inefficient program after the economy started to recover.
The New Deal did bring about some good changes, but Social Security was not one of them. It has been constantly abused by Congress, and it has grown topheavy and is no longer viable. It should have never happened in the first place.
It's unpopular among the younger people who can see that there likely be nothing left in the system by the time it's their turn, but among older people it is extremely popular.
The 55+ year old portion of the population is what has primarily stopped social security reform. They happen to be a very large voting block, and it is hard to get past them. The people in this block either are currently drawing social security or will be drawing it soon, so they certainly don't want to remove it. Also, people in this category tend to be more active voters than other categories, so even politicians who may otherwise be amiable to removing or revamping Social Security won't dare touch the subject.
It's a self perpetuating problem; more people are drawing social security than can be supported by the younger workforce. These people rely on it, and so will adamantly fight anything that jeopardizes that income (imagine if the government tried to slash your paycheck, and how adamantly you'd fight that, it's the same from their perspective). Combine them with idealogues who can't see past their ideology to see that the system is unsustainable and WILL crash at some point in the near future, and you've got a voting base that is nigh unsurmountable.
The fact is, there are more people who are pro Social Security, at least more people who vote anyway, than there are anti Social Security. This is pretty much the definition of Popular.
What we need is a welfare reform that fixes the problem without harming the people who currently rely on the system, or those who are currently expecting to be able to use those funds in the near future.
I believe it is doable, but a plan hasn't so far been presented in a way that it reassures the people at the highest risk.
It is well established that the most efficient use of the processor is "bursting" - heavy usage for short periods followed by long periods of idle. This is, in fact how most OS's work, or at least try to.
Furthermore, unless when you say "doing things" you mean video encoding and compression, or something similarly intensive, you are probably not normally going much above idle for any extended period of time. If your CPU is pegged at 100% for long periods of time, it is an indication of a problem.
Take a look at your running processes in Task Manager or your OSX or Linux equivalent to see what I mean. You'll see the CPU at 1% for the majority of the time, with it occasionally jumping up.
Because of the amount of time the OS idles, the key to battery life is minimizing power consumption at idle and maximizing the speed it completes tasks (to get it back to idle as fast as possible).
The perfect system would not be noticeably different in power from a wasteful system, yet would have significant battery life.
SSD's consume a lot less power than HDD's, couple your expanded battery capacity with aggressive power management and you might even be able to get more out of it.
WiFi is probably the next huge power sink after the hard drive, turning that off with the physical switch when you aren't actively browsing would squeeze more juice out of your laptop.
How does one ensure the integrity of a bio filter system at a random University?
Here's a hint: You don't. There aren't heavy regulations on this stuff until it gets to the point of mass productionf or public consumption. There are standard practices for safety and such, but these aren't government regulated and can very to a degree among institutions and among researchers.
There are no regulations regarding home chemistry aside from the control of some classes of chemicals and some types of equipment. There are a hell of a lot of regulations regarding releasing medical products for mass consumption. Just putting a "cure" for anything out on the market without going through federal processes is a good way to incur heavy fines have your equipment siezed, probably even some jail time.
That's where the check is, and that's where it needs to stay. Nothing needs to be done with DIY bio-engineered product X until it is ready for mass consumption. At that point, one could likely sell their idea to a major corp, or perhaps get donations to support it, and get it pushed through the propper FDA vetting and safety processes.
Really? I didn't know chemistry was illegal. I know certain chemicals are highly regulated, but not any kind of chemistry itself.
I wonder how all those science fair projects and high school chemistry labs sneek by under the nose of these government watchdogs?
See sig. I've been getting good use out of it lately.
I don't know that I've ever heard of an open source virus (could be wrong), if there really aren't that completely disproves your point. If all viruses were open source, they wouldn't exist.
However, open source software tends to be well maintained when it is widely used. You could equate the transperancy that allows for that with the ethics question in bio-engineering. Though, it will be dictated largely by popular pressure, which isn't always the best.
What's REALLY funny, as another commenter pointed out earlier, is that every company he complains about started as some guy with an idea and a garage about 10-20 years ago! Talk about raising the barrier to entry!
Google did not exist in the early 90's, some guys with a great idea for a search algorithm started a search engine in their garage (or maybe basement, I don't remember). People started saying "Hey, this is kinda cool", and it grew, and as it grew so did it's influence, and eventually the Mega-Corp Google (actually on the small end of mega-corp) was born.
Amazon, same thing, some guy in his garage said "I can't afford to open a book shop, I know, I'll sell books on the internet!". It started small, and grew, and now Amazon sells -everything- and keeps market prices down while doing so because of his business model.
Doctoro seems to be forming his opinion by closing his eyes to the last 15 years of the Internet. Well, 15 years is not a long time, and in that time we've seen entire markets shaken up by the continually lowering barrier to entry - just look at the newspapers going through the same thing now.
Google and Amazon may be gatekeepers, but it's the back gate they are keeping, and they've been propping it open. If they try to close it now, an enterprising individual will simply find a new gate to prop open.
The original article is just an oh-so-typical piece of American thinking, wherein money and market are the ultimate movers of everything.
It's not typical here, it is common, but not typical. It's also true, in a sense. Power is the ultimate mover of everything - he who has it has substantial control over his surroundings. The more power one has, the more control he has.
In the modern world, Money buys Power. More Money = more Power, more Power = more Control. Therefore, more Money = more Control. It's not some crazy irrational thought process, it's a truth of the modern world. There are parts of the world where money has less of a connection to power and control, these are mostly second and third world countries. In the West, money and power are practically interchangeable terms.
Also, culture does not last. Look at fall of the great civilizations in history - the Babolonians, the Persians, the Romans, etc. Precious little culture, compared to what they produced, has survived. The reason Picasso's painting is worth millions of dollars on the market is because very few paintings from just the last century or two exist. In another century or two, Picasso will probably be just a footnote in a textbook, with maybe an example of his work in a file somewhere. The orginal will likely be lost by then.
Lastly, well run corporations have shown they can survive for hundreds of years - there are a number of wine and liquor makers who have been around since the 1700's for example. Most die though, eventually. Nothing lasts.
I know the beowulf cluster is cool and all, but come on now, you're starting to lose geek cred for inaccuracy here. Beowulf clusters are whole machines clustered to act as one - so you can have a beowulf cluster of Wii's, PS3's, and Barbara Streisands, but not a beowulf cluster of Phenom IIs.
Besides, I thought it was assload of CPUs in a GPU package, not the other way around? Intel makes damn good CPUs, no matter how much their GPUs suck (they are adequate, but only for very small values of adequate).