You're right, that's why Google went bust when the dot com boom ended. Wait, no they didn't. Ad revenues aren't anywhere near where they were at the height of the dot com boom, but that doesn't mean you can't make a few bucks off of adverstising.
I suspect that this is probably mainly to cover bandwidth costs and the like. I think Mandrake knows that they'll never make much money off of downloaders, but they can at least stop them from being a net drain.
That's a good point (not that they couldn't put in text-based ads, but it seems less likely). Any word on whether the graphical installer still has problems with USB mice?
All they're changing is the default screensaver, and the bookmarks/toolbar links in the webbrowsers. So a recompile would be overkill, I think. The installer ads are the only ones that would probably need a recompile to strip out, and you only see those the first time.
This post is being written under Mandrake 9.1, but frankly I've been thinking about switching away for a while now. Mandrake never got their auto-update service working right, and they're down to about a half dozen mirrors, so I'm thinking I might go for Red Hat instead. Do they support Reiser FS yet?
I agree, cell phone companies subsidize cell phone costs. I also agree that if subsidized, the N-gage could be more reasonable. But it doesn't seem like Nokia is pushing the N-gage through cellular providers, it appears that they're pushing it through gaming outlets, which will not subsidize the cost.
Maybe that's just because it hasn't been released yet, though. I guess we'll see. Even putting that aside though, a sticker price of $300 is still over $100 more than most midrange cellphones, so even subsidized, it should be cheaper to buy a cell phone with equivalent capabilities, and a GBASP (that acronym just gets longer and longer, doesn't it?)
I'm not sure which they intended it as. By all reports, it fails at both. Even if it were either a good phone, or a good gaming system, the price is too high to justify.
A Gameboy Advance SP is $100. If the N-Gage were, say, $150, THEN I think they'd have something. But for $300, it has to be both a great phone, and a great gaming system, and its only target market is those people who were thinking about buying both a Gameboy and a cell phone at the same time.
At a price point around $150, it would only need to do ONE thing well, and the other integrated feature would merely have to justify the additional $50 or so.
So you're saying that it's actually SUPPOSED to look fake?
I think what he was trying to say is that if it looks like a bad real-world composite, rather than a good computer generated effect, then that's a big step forwards for CG. Now, obviously reasonable people can differ as to whether it actually looked like a bad real-world composite.
As a brief aside, one thing I found most amusing about Matrix Reloaded were the battlesuits. They moved like they were done in stop motion, like the cargo lifters in Aliens or something! After decades of sci-fi movies using stop motion, we've gotten to the point where we actually expect futuristic mechanical devices to move like that. Anyway, I thought it was funny.
True, but often times they're not the main writers anymore, just the "brand name." This is not unlike how Jay Leno is a comedian in his own right, but doesn't write much of his material for his show.
My post was not very clear. I agree with most of what you said, but I was just trying to make the point that jury nullification is really a subtle and legal form of civil disobedience. Just as non-violent protesting is legal, so is jury nullification. However, the official duty of a jury is to rule on whether or not the defendant is guilty, not whether or not the law is just. Jury nullification is legal, but is not officially something juries are supposed to do. But, yes, if a jury renders a "not guilty" verdict, the government can't do a damn thing about it.
The point, that it is a form of civil disobedience, is important because if it were part of a jury's job, then the legal system would become even more fucked up than it is. If any individual who didn't like a law was encouraged produce a hung jury, then hardly any laws would be enforcable. Jury nullification is useful, but it is ONLY a last resort. The Rule of Law is an important social system, and should not be cast aside in favor of arbitrary jury decisions in any but the most important cases.
I don't think there is any such "right." Indeed, you said yourself that in the William Penn case, the jury was punished rather harshly. On the other hand, if the jury rules "not guilty," whatever the reason, there's not a whole lot that can be done except calling a mistrial and redoing the whole procedure. So while it is a practice which may exist, I don't think it is correct to refer to it as a right. The courts consider it improper behavior by a jury, and the courts define rights.
Bullshit. My little brother (who was about 16 at the time) was once caught shoplifting, and when the police looked through his backpack, they found more than a joint's worth of marijuana. For both of those crimes together, he spent a grand total of 0 days in prison, instead being given probation and perhaps a fine.
Well, part of the problem with IBM's stock price is that they'd been accused of creative accounting (though not fraudulent, simply creative) even before Enron. After Enron, people started worrying about what else they DIDN'T know about IBM's accounting.
Remember, first and foremost, annual reports are advertising brouchures for the stock.
Allow me to back up what Bob, above, has already said with a concrete example: look at how the Soviets missed out on computers. The USSR was completely focused on heavy industry, and when the information age started, they were totally left in the lurch. One individual, even a committee of individuals, can never predict what the next big thing is going to be. The best way we've come up with so far is to let each memeber of society decide on his own (through direct purchases or investment).
Also, how do you expect to force businesses to accept your deflating currency if hard currency exists as well? Are you going to fix an exchange rate? If so, expect everyone to immediately exchange all of their deflating dollars for hard dollars, at which point how will you continue to guarantee the exchange rate without inflation? To some extent, this sort of behavior is what forced the world off the gold standard and fixed exchange rates. If you do not fix an exchange rate, but require that businesses accept deflating dollars anyway, then businesses will decline, and the informal market sector (which will NOT accept deflating dollars) will rise to the point where it dominates the economy. Formal sector businesses will become much like the national enterprises of the USSR, requiring people to stand in lines several hours long to purchase from a small selection of inferior goods, because only people with deflating dollars will patronize the formal sector. Anytime you restrict behavior, people find a way to exploit it.
"Business oriented socialism" is not a new idea, by the way. Fascism, at its core, was simply central planning for the sake of economic growth. F.A. Hayek has an excellent book on why that didn't work, and why gross human rights abuses were the inevitable result: The Road to Serfdom. His arguments are still valid today.
This is a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
I'm sorry, but that was pathetic. "World in Torment?" More people living in agony than ever before? The whole world used to be based on subsistence farming, perpetually on the edge of starvation, with life expectancies from birth below 40 years. The world is poorly managed? He has never witnessed the terrifying organizational power that is the New York Stock Exchange. The two great empires, America and Russia, are rubble? Well, Mr. Staff wrote this in 1992, and 11 years later America's economy has continued to grow on a per capita basis. His contention that population growth is even faster than exponential, it's hyperbolic, is flat out wrong. Population growth rates have been slowing in industrialized nations (negative in most of Europe, and almost 0 in the US without immigration), and as China and India develop, numerical population growth rates will fall as well.
This kind of insipid crap certainly doesn't make ME say "wow," much less "my brain is burning." As far as I can see, his whole autonomy thing is based on a beefed up form of Import Substituting Industrialization, an economic theory which has caused untold misery in South America (explains his involvement with Chile) and the MENA region. It sounded like a good idea, I'll grant you, but great minds can produce terrible things when they proceed from faulty assumptions.
Sure, but all of these are long term projects. Fusion power, by itself, will not kill oil companies, we'll need to have hydrogen powered cars as well, and even optimistic forcasts put that at least 5 years off. On top of that, politicians would have to explain to their constituents why they're banning a much cheaper form of electricity. No matter how powerful you think oil companies are, they can't stop EVERY country from using fusion, so word will get out about how much better it is.
No, oil companies won't have the will, nor will politicians have the incentive, to block cold fusion if it were invented.
Yes, but oil is rarely used in generating electricity. Unless this form of fusion is compact enough to stick in your car, oil will be largely uneffected.
Really? Where did you hear this? Everything I've heard says he's ONLY releasing the Special Edition on DVD, and that the original edition will never see the light of day again.
I'm sure they meant to say "Sandman comic." Dream Hunters was a Sandman story, but it was illustrated prose rather than a comic. It's late, cut them a little slack.
Actually, I saw a show a little while back claiming that it wasn't the wind that caused the tanks to sink, it was the current and inept crew (standard tank crew, with no sea experience). As the DDs were swept eastward, they kept themselves pointed towards preset landmarks, usually church spires, to insure they hit the right landing zone. As they moved farther and farther from those landmarks laterally, the tanks were no longer headed straight in to shore, but rather at a large angle. The skirts were well protected from waves hitting the backs of the tanks, but very poorly protected from waves hitting the sides, and so beyond a certain angle, the skirts collapsed and the tanks sank.
Of course, none of that wouldn't have been a problem if the order to release tanks closer into shore (because of the weather) had been obeyed by more than one ship.
...you pay the HP tax? Dell's got a much lower cost operation and can afford to undercut HP by a substantial amount, you might as well just buy from them, and get your copy of Windows for free (relative to the price of the equivalent computer from HP w/o Windows).
Yeah, it got them to delay the vote long enough for the general public to forget about it. Once everyone's gone home and forgotten, they'll vote yes anyway:)
The article was specifically aimed at Americans too, so the income level of the rest of the world is irrelevant here. Besides, people in Africa aren't poor because machines are taking their jobs, they're poor because they have corrupt governments, disease, short or nonexistant coastlines, poor soil, etc.
How is it nonsensical to state that the poor are getting richer? If a person right on the 20% mark 100 years ago was malnourished because he couldn't afford enough to eat, whereas today he can eat enough to become obsese, and has cable TV besides, wouldn't you say he's richer?
I'll grant you that the wealth gap is not totally irrelevant, but so long as the poor continue to experience rising incomes in real terms, I don't think we need to get too worked up over robots taking our jobs.
Have a look at this. Go ahead, I can wait. We're specifically focusing on the inflation adjusted incomes here, which is on the second table, not the first.
Now then, look at the first column, the bottom 20%. The upper income limit of the bottom 20% has increased by 33% from 1967 to 2001. On top of that, the average household size has been falling, so that money does not have to be spread around to as many people. Now obviously, the top 5% has increased at a faster rate, the lower limit on the top 5% has doubled in the same period.
The point I'm trying to make is that even though wealth has been concentrating more in the upper classes, the lower classes have been gaining as well! In fact, one of the reasons the wealthy are gaining faster has nothing to do with technology, it's because of feminism. Whereas 35 years ago, the wives of most wealthy men were housewives, today they're more likely to have high paying jobs themselves, being doctors, lawyers, what have you. In contrast, poor women have always had to work, simply as a matter of survival. Anyway, until we find a 10 year period where incomes fall for any age group, I think we can dismiss this as hysterical FUD.
It's a kind of coarse cornmeal, and is prepared similarly to oatmeal ("instant grits" exist, as well as the old fashioned kind). The cooked grits can then be used in a variety of different recipes. Grits are generally eaten in the southern regions of the USA, though of course the Native Americans originated the concept (since corn, after all, came from the Americas, not Europe).
Grits were also featured in My Cousin Vinny. What they have to do with Natalie Portman, I couldn't say.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that this is probably mainly to cover bandwidth costs and the like. I think Mandrake knows that they'll never make much money off of downloaders, but they can at least stop them from being a net drain.
That's a good point (not that they couldn't put in text-based ads, but it seems less likely). Any word on whether the graphical installer still has problems with USB mice?
This post is being written under Mandrake 9.1, but frankly I've been thinking about switching away for a while now. Mandrake never got their auto-update service working right, and they're down to about a half dozen mirrors, so I'm thinking I might go for Red Hat instead. Do they support Reiser FS yet?
But yeah, Bill & Ted were great. "Ted my friend, strange things are afoot at the circle-K."
Maybe that's just because it hasn't been released yet, though. I guess we'll see. Even putting that aside though, a sticker price of $300 is still over $100 more than most midrange cellphones, so even subsidized, it should be cheaper to buy a cell phone with equivalent capabilities, and a GBASP (that acronym just gets longer and longer, doesn't it?)
A Gameboy Advance SP is $100. If the N-Gage were, say, $150, THEN I think they'd have something. But for $300, it has to be both a great phone, and a great gaming system, and its only target market is those people who were thinking about buying both a Gameboy and a cell phone at the same time.
At a price point around $150, it would only need to do ONE thing well, and the other integrated feature would merely have to justify the additional $50 or so.
I think what he was trying to say is that if it looks like a bad real-world composite, rather than a good computer generated effect, then that's a big step forwards for CG. Now, obviously reasonable people can differ as to whether it actually looked like a bad real-world composite.
As a brief aside, one thing I found most amusing about Matrix Reloaded were the battlesuits. They moved like they were done in stop motion, like the cargo lifters in Aliens or something! After decades of sci-fi movies using stop motion, we've gotten to the point where we actually expect futuristic mechanical devices to move like that. Anyway, I thought it was funny.
True, but often times they're not the main writers anymore, just the "brand name." This is not unlike how Jay Leno is a comedian in his own right, but doesn't write much of his material for his show.
The point, that it is a form of civil disobedience, is important because if it were part of a jury's job, then the legal system would become even more fucked up than it is. If any individual who didn't like a law was encouraged produce a hung jury, then hardly any laws would be enforcable. Jury nullification is useful, but it is ONLY a last resort. The Rule of Law is an important social system, and should not be cast aside in favor of arbitrary jury decisions in any but the most important cases.
I don't think there is any such "right." Indeed, you said yourself that in the William Penn case, the jury was punished rather harshly. On the other hand, if the jury rules "not guilty," whatever the reason, there's not a whole lot that can be done except calling a mistrial and redoing the whole procedure. So while it is a practice which may exist, I don't think it is correct to refer to it as a right. The courts consider it improper behavior by a jury, and the courts define rights.
Bullshit. My little brother (who was about 16 at the time) was once caught shoplifting, and when the police looked through his backpack, they found more than a joint's worth of marijuana. For both of those crimes together, he spent a grand total of 0 days in prison, instead being given probation and perhaps a fine.
Remember, first and foremost, annual reports are advertising brouchures for the stock.
Also, how do you expect to force businesses to accept your deflating currency if hard currency exists as well? Are you going to fix an exchange rate? If so, expect everyone to immediately exchange all of their deflating dollars for hard dollars, at which point how will you continue to guarantee the exchange rate without inflation? To some extent, this sort of behavior is what forced the world off the gold standard and fixed exchange rates. If you do not fix an exchange rate, but require that businesses accept deflating dollars anyway, then businesses will decline, and the informal market sector (which will NOT accept deflating dollars) will rise to the point where it dominates the economy. Formal sector businesses will become much like the national enterprises of the USSR, requiring people to stand in lines several hours long to purchase from a small selection of inferior goods, because only people with deflating dollars will patronize the formal sector. Anytime you restrict behavior, people find a way to exploit it.
"Business oriented socialism" is not a new idea, by the way. Fascism, at its core, was simply central planning for the sake of economic growth. F.A. Hayek has an excellent book on why that didn't work, and why gross human rights abuses were the inevitable result: The Road to Serfdom. His arguments are still valid today.
This is a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
This kind of insipid crap certainly doesn't make ME say "wow," much less "my brain is burning." As far as I can see, his whole autonomy thing is based on a beefed up form of Import Substituting Industrialization, an economic theory which has caused untold misery in South America (explains his involvement with Chile) and the MENA region. It sounded like a good idea, I'll grant you, but great minds can produce terrible things when they proceed from faulty assumptions.
No, oil companies won't have the will, nor will politicians have the incentive, to block cold fusion if it were invented.
Yes, but oil is rarely used in generating electricity. Unless this form of fusion is compact enough to stick in your car, oil will be largely uneffected.
Really? Where did you hear this? Everything I've heard says he's ONLY releasing the Special Edition on DVD, and that the original edition will never see the light of day again.
Well, the time posted is UCT, and as most Slashdot readers are American, we're some 7 hours earlier than that.
I'm sure they meant to say "Sandman comic." Dream Hunters was a Sandman story, but it was illustrated prose rather than a comic. It's late, cut them a little slack.
Of course, none of that wouldn't have been a problem if the order to release tanks closer into shore (because of the weather) had been obeyed by more than one ship.
...you pay the HP tax? Dell's got a much lower cost operation and can afford to undercut HP by a substantial amount, you might as well just buy from them, and get your copy of Windows for free (relative to the price of the equivalent computer from HP w/o Windows).
Yeah, it got them to delay the vote long enough for the general public to forget about it. Once everyone's gone home and forgotten, they'll vote yes anyway :)
How is it nonsensical to state that the poor are getting richer? If a person right on the 20% mark 100 years ago was malnourished because he couldn't afford enough to eat, whereas today he can eat enough to become obsese, and has cable TV besides, wouldn't you say he's richer?
I'll grant you that the wealth gap is not totally irrelevant, but so long as the poor continue to experience rising incomes in real terms, I don't think we need to get too worked up over robots taking our jobs.
Now then, look at the first column, the bottom 20%. The upper income limit of the bottom 20% has increased by 33% from 1967 to 2001. On top of that, the average household size has been falling, so that money does not have to be spread around to as many people. Now obviously, the top 5% has increased at a faster rate, the lower limit on the top 5% has doubled in the same period.
The point I'm trying to make is that even though wealth has been concentrating more in the upper classes, the lower classes have been gaining as well! In fact, one of the reasons the wealthy are gaining faster has nothing to do with technology, it's because of feminism. Whereas 35 years ago, the wives of most wealthy men were housewives, today they're more likely to have high paying jobs themselves, being doctors, lawyers, what have you. In contrast, poor women have always had to work, simply as a matter of survival. Anyway, until we find a 10 year period where incomes fall for any age group, I think we can dismiss this as hysterical FUD.
It's a kind of coarse cornmeal, and is prepared similarly to oatmeal ("instant grits" exist, as well as the old fashioned kind). The cooked grits can then be used in a variety of different recipes. Grits are generally eaten in the southern regions of the USA, though of course the Native Americans originated the concept (since corn, after all, came from the Americas, not Europe).
Grits were also featured in My Cousin Vinny. What they have to do with Natalie Portman, I couldn't say.