"Just go get the cheapest Windows PC you can find (they have a sticker that says "Vista Capable" or "Vista Ready") and install Linux."
Are you willing to buy it back from me for the price I gave if one or more of its peripherals has no good Linux device driver, where by good I mean having speed and feature parity with the Windows driver? Are you willing to send me the cost of Windows, so I don't have to pay for something I don't want?
Actually, never mind--even if you're willing to do that, some of my money would be going to MS, and I will not do anything that benefits MS.
Al Gore is the chairman of Generation Investment Management, a company that sells carbon offsets (in particular, he buys his carbon offsets from his company. Does that make him biased as well?
I have no idea about whether the RIAA is pushing it, but Jacobson and his wife are two of four people who founded Palisade Systems, which may be the company to which you refer. See this article from the Ames (Iowa) Tribune.
I felt a huge disturbance in the Force, as if Japanese speakers and students everywhere emitted a mighty groan...
Ah, well. At least if the character dies, we could maybe hear some Jay Ungar and Molly Mason mixed in with the John Williams, as they play "Ahsoka Farewell".
'25:63: The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"'
In Russian, "mir" means both "peace" and "world", and Russian, like Latin, lacks articles, so that it seems likely to me that "All we want is peace" and "All we want is the world" would be rendered identically in Russian.... which always set me a bit on edge back in the days of the USSR.
What does that have to do with anything? Semitic languages leave out vowels (probably making claptrap like the "Bible Code" even easier to finagle); consonant clusters have basic meanings, e.g. k-t-b for reading, hence Swahili _kitabu_, book, borrowed from Arabic. s-l-m are the consonants of salaam (peace), but also of islam (submission, in particular to the will of Allah). Could someone who knows more Arabic than I do (a condition not requiring knowing much Arabic at all, to be sure!) say whether the quoted text is written ambiguously in the original?
Be sure to put the hot grits scene in the trailer!
Go back and read _Free to Choose_...
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Regulation is a means by which the established companies keep possible competition from developing. MS can pay for that overhead from pocket change; can Open Source developers?
>...let us use this opportunity to acknowledge what Bill has done for Tech, especially now that he is going to be focusing more on his humanitarian work.
From the Wikipedia article on Al Capone:
"Capone often tried to whitewash his image and be seen as a community leader. For example, he started a program, which was continued for decades after his death, to fight rickets by providing a daily milk ration to Chicago school children. Also during the Great Depression, Capone opened up many soup kitchens for the poor and homeless."
Same here... I wound up going to work for someone because it would give me access to his sweet 6809 setup, and I moved to the CoCo 2, then 3, ASAP so I could run OS-9 at home.
I still have CoCo 3s (plural; the SALT chip has a tendency to go out), and still go to the annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFest (save this past year, when unemployment stopped me).
True... but that doesn't mean MS didn't want that outcome. Get your bogus "standard" approved, then have your lapdogs prevent anything else from progressing.
>Of course you realise that every single one of those economies started out by vigorously ignoring IP, especially that of other nations, until such time as it had some of its own to protect and only then implemented its own IP-related laws, don't you?
Yup. In the case of the US, recall Samuel Slater, a guy with a really good memory who indulged in a bit of industrial espionage, going through an English textile factory and seeing how it worked, then coming to the US and building one.
The problem is that that fastest thing in the universe has to travel an extra 44,000 miles between the earth and the satellite and then back to earth, compared with a terrestrial connection. That's a hair under 1/4th second added time, for transit just one way. Put it this way: it means the fastest possible ping is around 500 ms (because the ping goes there and back) if you're using satellite internet. Ask a gamer what he or she would think of an ISP with that kind of latency.
Insurance is a tradeoff. You trade the risk of being wiped out by an unlikely and expensive misfortune for the certainty of paying the expected value of that misfortune along with a bunch of other people. Whether you think it worth the tradeoff depends on the likelihood and the expense of the event. Make it sufficiently expensive and unlikely, and that tradeoff sounds darned good to me.
An immediate consequence of that is that there's no reason to insure against an event that is sure to happen, because then its expected value is equal to its expense--life insurance insures against early death. It therefore is not the business of insurance to pay for regular examinations (or, to address the "why does insurance pay for Viagra but not birth control?" canard, birth control, since one is almost certain to have a properly functioning reproductive system)--but unfortunately, that leads to people not having those regular examinations, letting problems get bad enough to need treatment that is covered. I don't have a good answer to that one--maybe raising insurance rates for those who can't prove they've had regular preventive maintenance?
Agreed about Logitech's thumb-driven trackballs; they drive me crazy. They make my thumb hurt, and they're impossible to efficiently and accurately position.
I never could convince myself to spring the near $100 for the huge Kensington trackball, but what I use and love is the Logitech Marble Mouse. The trackball falls comfortably under the index and middle fingers, and is easy to move around. Optical--admittedly that's just about universal these days save for bottom-of-the-barrel mice. About $20 at your favorite big box store. Only drawback is that the older ones only have two buttons, and the added buttons on the new ones are kind of tiny.
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"Just go get the cheapest Windows PC you can find (they have a sticker that says "Vista Capable" or "Vista Ready") and install Linux."
Are you willing to buy it back from me for the price I gave if one or more of its peripherals has no good Linux device driver, where by good I mean having speed and feature parity with the Windows driver? Are you willing to send me the cost of Windows, so I don't have to pay for something I don't want?
Actually, never mind--even if you're willing to do that, some of my money would be going to MS, and I will not do anything that benefits MS.
Al Gore is the chairman of Generation Investment Management, a company that sells carbon offsets (in particular, he buys his carbon offsets from his company. Does that make him biased as well?
"You can't defeat the argument that Exxon sponsored the linked-to website..."
As Michael Palin once said, that's not an argument. It too is an ad hominem fallacy: because Exxon sponsors a website, its contents are not valid.
Gore is chairman of Generation Investment Management, the company that he buys carbon offsets from (see here for details), so he is paying himself.
I have no idea about whether the RIAA is pushing it, but Jacobson and his wife are two of four people who founded Palisade Systems, which may be the company to which you refer. See this article from the Ames (Iowa) Tribune.
I felt a huge disturbance in the Force, as if Japanese speakers and students everywhere emitted a mighty groan...
Ah, well. At least if the character dies, we could maybe hear some Jay Ungar and Molly Mason mixed in with the John Williams, as they play "Ahsoka Farewell".
> Probably just due to being forced to use it regularly.
Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome?
All those Sunday paper inserts for Sears, Penney's, etc. with photos of children...
People will _always_ find something to fantasize about. The question is: must everyone be constrained by what might set off a tiny minority?
'25:63: The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"'
In Russian, "mir" means both "peace" and "world", and Russian, like Latin, lacks articles, so that it seems likely to me that "All we want is peace" and "All we want is the world" would be rendered identically in Russian.... which always set me a bit on edge back in the days of the USSR.
What does that have to do with anything? Semitic languages leave out vowels (probably making claptrap like the "Bible Code" even easier to finagle); consonant clusters have basic meanings, e.g. k-t-b for reading, hence Swahili _kitabu_, book, borrowed from Arabic. s-l-m are the consonants of salaam (peace), but also of islam (submission, in particular to the will of Allah). Could someone who knows more Arabic than I do (a condition not requiring knowing much Arabic at all, to be sure!) say whether the quoted text is written ambiguously in the original?
Be sure to put the hot grits scene in the trailer!
Regulation is a means by which the established companies keep possible competition from developing. MS can pay for that overhead from pocket change; can Open Source developers?
>...let us use this opportunity to acknowledge what Bill has done for Tech, especially now that he is going to be focusing more on his humanitarian work.
From the Wikipedia article on Al Capone:
"Capone often tried to whitewash his image and be seen as a community leader. For example, he started a program, which was continued for decades after his death, to fight rickets by providing a daily milk ration to Chicago school children. Also during the Great Depression, Capone opened up many soup kitchens for the poor and homeless."
Same here... I wound up going to work for someone because it would give me access to his sweet 6809 setup, and I moved to the CoCo 2, then 3, ASAP so I could run OS-9 at home.
I still have CoCo 3s (plural; the SALT chip has a tendency to go out), and still go to the annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFest (save this past year, when unemployment stopped me).
>The Linux revolution begins... In Iowa, at Walmart.
Where in Iowa? I'm in Des Moines, and the web site tells me that there's not one within 100 miles of my ZIP code... *pout*
RANDU! Save us, RANDU!
Oh, wait, that was Landru.
Some of us in the US do know, and do remember.
In one sense, the guy is right. The deal wasn't sabotaged, in the sense that the computers are being purchased with Mandriva.
OTOH, MS can't allow a large number of users to be exposed to Open Source software, so...
...there's a vampiric relationship between record labels and artists.
That is an amazing story. Now, I hope that all filkers will get to work. The first line, of course:
"I've been a Mars Rover for many a year..."
True... but that doesn't mean MS didn't want that outcome. Get your bogus "standard" approved, then have your lapdogs prevent anything else from progressing.
>Of course you realise that every single one of those economies started out by vigorously ignoring IP, especially that of other nations, until such time as it had some of its own to protect and only then implemented its own IP-related laws, don't you?
Yup. In the case of the US, recall Samuel Slater, a guy with a really good memory who indulged in a bit of industrial espionage, going through an English textile factory and seeing how it worked, then coming to the US and building one.
The problem is that that fastest thing in the universe has to travel an extra 44,000 miles between the earth and the satellite and then back to earth, compared with a terrestrial connection. That's a hair under 1/4th second added time, for transit just one way. Put it this way: it means the fastest possible ping is around 500 ms (because the ping goes there and back) if you're using satellite internet. Ask a gamer what he or she would think of an ISP with that kind of latency.
Ah, the same way bluenoses want to prevent girls from getting vaccinated against HPV, so that, by golly, sex will have consequences!
Insurance is a tradeoff. You trade the risk of being wiped out by an unlikely and expensive misfortune for the certainty of paying the expected value of that misfortune along with a bunch of other people. Whether you think it worth the tradeoff depends on the likelihood and the expense of the event. Make it sufficiently expensive and unlikely, and that tradeoff sounds darned good to me.
An immediate consequence of that is that there's no reason to insure against an event that is sure to happen, because then its expected value is equal to its expense--life insurance insures against early death. It therefore is not the business of insurance to pay for regular examinations (or, to address the "why does insurance pay for Viagra but not birth control?" canard, birth control, since one is almost certain to have a properly functioning reproductive system)--but unfortunately, that leads to people not having those regular examinations, letting problems get bad enough to need treatment that is covered. I don't have a good answer to that one--maybe raising insurance rates for those who can't prove they've had regular preventive maintenance?
Agreed about Logitech's thumb-driven trackballs; they drive me crazy. They make my thumb hurt, and they're impossible to efficiently and accurately position.
I never could convince myself to spring the near $100 for the huge Kensington trackball, but what I use and love is the Logitech Marble Mouse. The trackball falls comfortably under the index and middle fingers, and is easy to move around. Optical--admittedly that's just about universal these days save for bottom-of-the-barrel mice. About $20 at your favorite big box store. Only drawback is that the older ones only have two buttons, and the added buttons on the new ones are kind of tiny.