So we replace spooky correlation at a distance with causal influences from the future?
Yes, that's exactly what we do. Relativity and action at a distance are incompatible. "Advanced action" as Price calls it, reconciles relativity with quantum mechanics. We just need to get over ourselves in thinking that backwards causation is impossible. Michael Dummett laid out the necessary conditions for backwards causation about 50 years ago, and coincidentally enough, the setup of QM experiments satisfy the very conditions necessary for backwards causation to take place. The main condition being that we cannot non-destructively observe the state of the particle before the future cause of the present effect.
Maybe you should do a cursory search before accusing someone of being a kook. Well you can look up the academic papers yourself. Here is Price's first major paper on the topic. It's published in Mind, which is quite the respectable journal. And yes, it's philosophy, not pure physics. Price also has plenty of other works indexed by Google Scholar.
Anyway, I don't understand your argument against my characterization that free will is a moral property. What's "forcing" you to do anything? Is it your physical system of particles typically referred to as the "brain"? If so, wouldn't you want this "determining" what you do rather than something else that is external to yourself?
I say it's a moral property because that is the only valid reason to care about whether an action was "free" or not. "Free will" as a theoretical construct has no place in neurology, psychology, sociology, or anything that studies how, in fact, the world actually is. The only reason we care if some action is "free" is to properly assign blame. We do not blame the man who performed an immoral act with a gun to his back, because he was not free to act as he chose.
One might be inclined to say that we can easily determine the behavior of invalids and the like, thus they lack free will. And then one can wonder whether in the presence of an intelligence much greater than our own we will be seen as just as determinable. But this is all silly. We "determine" other people's motives and actions all the time. It is a rare day that a close friend or coworker does something unpredictable.
And has been said many times, unpredictability is no solace. Why should I derive any comfort from the idea that there's some true randomness inherent in my decision making, whether this is brought about by quantum mechanics or just a random number generator in my head? I may as well be a piece on a monopoly board who's next move is determined by a die roll, if you want to look at it that way.
And so why isn't the robot free? Anyway, assume that humans have souls that exist in some other metaphysical realm that actually controls what we think and do. Why does that make our actions any more free? Why does it matter if our human bodies are puppets of some immaterial soul or if the means for rational thought is within the bodies (brains) themselves? I can't see any good reason. There's no a priori reason some metaphysical entity couldn't fully study and determine the future actions of one's immaterial soul. In short, "determinability" doesn't mean much.
First of all, quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with free will. Free will, if understood properly, is a moral property of human agents. And whether someone is responsible for his actions has nothing to do with our final understanding of subatomic physics.
Secondly, the physics is questionable. There are several assumptions underlying Bell's inequalities. One of which is that incoming (that is, earlier in time) influences are independent. However, the fundamental laws are, for the most part, time symmetric. (The exceptions are the neutral kaon which has questionable significance and entropy, which is a supervenient law that needs to be explained by cosmic boundary conditions.)
The point is that we should not expect incoming influences to be independent. We should expect variable dependence going both ways in time. "Agency" and "observer" being primitive theoretical entities was always a metaphysical abomination. Happily, it's not necessary once the symmetry of time is fully appreciated.
I'm not saying anything new. Huw Price is the principle proponent of this view and he's not the one who came up with it either. To my knowledge there has been no serious reply to Price's proposal. So his work sits largely ignored, while media attention goes to crazy interpretations that give free will to subatomic particles, and various other metaphysical abominations.
These optimizations are nice, but leave out the most obvious and important improvement to the codecs that have yet to be made. Most processors sold nowadays are 2 or more cores. And smooth single-threaded processing of 1080p x264 is impossible on all but the absolute highest end processors. So the most important step is obvious multi-threading. There's a summer of code project for that too. I'm surprised the author of the article missed it.
How are they going to mess up your database with read-only access? They could run intensive queries, I guess. But unless you've got million+ row tables that are being accessed concurrently by tens of clients, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Anyway, just enable logging and look through what they've been doing in case it's anything stupid. I used to work for a large insurance firm and we'd get a call minutes after doing against the database we shouldn't.
And chemists are just doing heuristic physics, and biologists are just doing heuristic chemistry.
All of math reduces to logic and set theory but you don't see philosophers snubbing their noses at mathematicians. I agree that "computer science" is a misnomer in many ways, but "algorithm" in this case is not a misnomer. Yes, it's readily apparent that all algorithms can ultimately be represented mathematically, but that means no more than the reduction of math to logic.
A machine with swap enabled will always have more throughput than a machine without. It's a better use of the resources available. However, replace that swap space with the same amount of RAM, and of course that will be even better. Some use this as an argument against swap space, but it's not a fair comparison, since you can enable swap space in the RAM increased machine and increase throughput even more.
So when I think of this recommendation system, a better algorithm is like having swap space enabled. It's a more sophisticated use of the data you have. Having more data is like having more RAM. And of course the best option is to have more reference data and a better algorithm. It's not an exclusive disjunction, and it's silly to think it has to be.
No, they have a pretty average failure rate actually. Check the newegg reviews for the 750GB model. I just got burned on mine. It lasted four days and then went kaput. Time to RMA.
Mar 26 09:36:31 opteron kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sdg1, logical block 5912 Mar 26 09:36:36 opteron kernel: printk: 1579 messages suppressed.
Not sure how true it is, but some people are saying these drives are just binned 7200rpms that didn't make the cut. In any case, it seems clear that these drives are actually 5400rpm, not some variable speed between 7200rpm and 5400rpm.
Well, they can be. I tried to do SSD in a laptop by plugging a CF card into a mini-ide adapter a few years ago. The 40x or even 80x CF cards are definitely slower than hard drives. Hard drives sold as "SSD" and already shaped into a hard drive form factor do seem to be faster than regular flash media. That speed comes at a very high premium though. On newegg, a 8GB CF card costs $25-$35 at the low range. A 8GB SSD drive costs $175-$250 at the low range (for the laptop drive form factor).
See 2ch.net:
There are numerous civil actions against Hiroyuki by individuals and corporations for slander and defamation. Hiroyuki so far ignored every court order and has never shown up for any trial and he has lost every civil case brought against him by default. Hiroyuki does not hold any sizable asset in Japan and any financial gain by Hiroyuki (bar what the court rule as necessary living expense) is subject to foreclosure. 2channel's assets are all held overseas; the servers are located in California and the domains are owned by a United States registrar. Moreover, technically, Hiroyuki does not own 2channel. None of the winners of civil action collected any money from Hiroyuki.
In January 2007, a small court in Japan, making a judgement on yet another slander case, announced that 2channel's holding company was bankrupt and it would be repossessed. This claim was openly mocked by Hiroyuki on 2channel's splash page, and nothing of the sort happened, although 2channel's Japanese ISP ended its operations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2ch#Free_speech Basically, any website that doesn't want government regulation will just relocate its servers to the U.S. Due to the differing laws, they will not be able to subpoena IP logs or have any way of getting at the people that post to the site. The owner of the site may have some trouble if he continues living in Japan, but there will probably be ex patriots in the U.S. willing to "own" the site to avoid such trouble.
The only interesting part of that article is in the summary, so save yourself the time it would take to get through that rambling mess.
I'm not an expert, but I've taken several courses on biologically oriented psychology and I have no idea what "biochemical friction" is supposed to be. Is that just a redundant phrase pointing to the cortisol and adrenaline released by multi-tasking, or is it a separate phenomenon?
I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that peeing in the bushes or an 18 yr old having sex with a 16 yr old deserves a place on these sex offender registries. And while such cases do sometimes end up on registries, they do not represent the "typical" sex offender. The most common crime on these registries, as far as I've seen by actually browsing through them, is child molestation. Excluding minor offenses such as the ones you mentioned seem so uncontroversial that it's not worth addressing.
I think the reverse is true. DV perpetrators tend to have anti-social personality disorder. No, that doesn't mean they are shut-ins. Those with anti-social disorder have little trouble forming relationships, partly because they have no remorse about lying. They are very good about putting on a convincing face, and then turning violent and abusive once the relationship becomes serious.
DV victims, on the other hand, tend to stay with those who abuse them. It's often the girlfriend/wife with black eyes that comes and bails out the abuser. If a database like the one proposed existed, then it could be used to pierce the facade that abusers put forth. And it could also help friends with suspicions to convince the woman the man is not as he presents himself.
Sex offenders, on the other hand, are usually incestuous, and the recidivism rate for these offenders is quite low, especially compared to the general prison population. Jump out of the bushes type of offenders are quite rare, and these people do have much higher recidivism rates.
Anecdotally, my first stepfather was physically abusive to my mother, and my second sexually abused my sister. The first, after spending time in jail for assaulting my mother and grandmother, managed to start a whole new family. Eventually, he burned down their house in an attempt to kill all of them. Luckily it was not successful. The second stepfather, after serving his sentence, does pretty much nothing except for the type of menial work a person of his status can get, spending his evenings watching TV. I don't really see him as much of a threat, not that I'd want to hang out with him.
Well salesmen rarely do this. However, imagine a UPS driver delivering 40 different packages to various parts of a city. It would be quite useful to automatically determine the order of delivery ahead of time in such a way as to minimize time and distance. As indicated in other replies to this thread, good solutions are much easier to come by than perfect solutions. The difference between the two solutions is probably not great enough to justify the immense computation power required to churn out the perfect solution. The perfect solution would probably end up costing more since you have to figure in the cost of energy used to compute it.
The submitter just wanted to be able to use google maps to find the optimal route between points on an errand run. If you limit the number of nodes to 10, then perfect solutions remain tractable. And I doubt most people would have more than 10 errands to run at once.
On a related note, I just had a Mormon missionary knocking on my door last night. Perhaps we could rename this the traveling Mormon problem. I'm sure they would appreciate automated itineraries that minimize the burden on their poor soles.
Gee, wonder why they're praising Ada so much.
Robert B.K. Dewar, Ph.D., is president of AdaCore and a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University. He has been involved in the design and implementation of Ada since 1980 as a distinguished reviewer, a member of the Ada Rapporteur group, and the chief architect of Gnu Ada Translator.
Edmond Schonberg, Ph.D., is vice-president of AdaCore and a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University. He has been involved in the implementation of Ada since 1981. With Robert Dewar and other collaborators, he created the first validated implementation of Ada83, the first prototype compiler for Ada9X, and the first full implementation of Ada2005. Maybe Ada is helpful for learning concurrent programming and safe typing, but I'll wait for the opinion of a slightly less partial party.
It doesn't matter if it was one page or ten pages, what matters is the reasonability of expectation. For example, selling a picture of an xbox in such a way as to fool bidders into paying the price of an actual xbox, is fraudulent, even if you put the fact that it's a picture at the end of a one page description.
I've done plenty of computer repair work myself, and known many people that do such work for different places. $160 is a ridiculous sum, even including labor. The average tech makes less than $15/hr, charging $85/hr is near fraudulent. Not only this, but most of the time for a job such as this is letting the OS installer run with minimal input. So that $10-$15/hr tech is typically triple charging his time as he lets multiple machines install at once. I don't know where you heard that %100 markup is fair, but I've never heard of anyone engaging in such markup for parts used in computer repair. As far as I've seen, parts are charged the same as if the customer walked into the store to just but the drive. Taking replaced parts out of warranty, even when the customer wants them back--this is just completely new to me, and I've been in the computer field for over a decade.
In the end it would come down to what the reasonable expectation is as considered by the small claims court judge. Personally, I would feel quite confident making that case myself.
Contracts require "meeting of the minds". And again, there was a reasonable expectation that he would be able to keep his old drive, given that he was paying way over retail for the new one. You can't impose any condition you please just by burying it under 10 pages of fine print. Imagine buying a new car and getting ready to drive off when the salesman says, "Oh yeah, the ten page contract you signed stipulates that we get to keep your old car," when nothing of the sort was mentioned before. While it is typical to get trade in value for a car you are replacing, no one is going to accept such a trade in unless it is explicitly mentioned and negotiated beforehand. Maybe you had planned to give the car to your son, or sell it yourself.
Similarly, it is typical that the trade in value of the old drive factors into the price of replacement and repair, but it must be made explicit. The exception is when replacing a drive under warranty. It is generally understood that a warranty guarantees you a working set of components, and so it would be expected that in replacing a component, the warranter keeps the broken unit to recover any possible remaining value and to discourage warranty fraud. However, this did not happen under warranty. The price for repair was much greater than the cost of typical drive, so there is no way that the customer could have reasonably expected that the $160 was based on the store keeping his old drive. I think the customer could easily win this in small claims court. He'd get his old drive and money back, and the store would get the replacement drive back. He could then his laptop to another store and renegotiate the repair of his laptop.
I don't see Australia shutting down any sites that aren't hosted in Australia. I remember France getting upset about some Yahoo auction items containing Nazi paraphernalia, and I think Yahoo eventually complied, but only because they wanted to keep doing business in France. I doubt 4chan has any significant business stake in Australia. Things might get interesting for sites that do have a significant business stake in Australia, however. They'll probably only do filtering if you're coming from Australia though, using the same type of detection scheme that google uses to forward you to the localized version of their site.
Why set up a dummy company? I know creative labs, for instance, has their own ebay presence, and the account name is "creative-labs" or something, with thousands of feedback. Sometimes they sell for a fixed price, sometimes they take best offers, and sometimes they start the auction at 20% below MSRP and let it go to whatever.
Bizarrely, Firefox for Windows running through wine runs faster than native Firefox. The wine installation doesn't have any add-ons though, so that might be the difference. Wine version is 0.9.51 and windows firefox version is 2.0.0.9, same machine as my post above. Wine results. Native results.
My results were a little better than yours, maybe 25%, but still about double the time of the firefox numbers in the article. Maybe it's the extensions I have, such as linkification. Dual Opteron 252, 6GB RAM, SuSE 10.3 64-bit, firefox 2.0.0.10.
Slashdot Mirror
So we replace spooky correlation at a distance with causal influences from the future?
Yes, that's exactly what we do. Relativity and action at a distance are incompatible. "Advanced action" as Price calls it, reconciles relativity with quantum mechanics. We just need to get over ourselves in thinking that backwards causation is impossible. Michael Dummett laid out the necessary conditions for backwards causation about 50 years ago, and coincidentally enough, the setup of QM experiments satisfy the very conditions necessary for backwards causation to take place. The main condition being that we cannot non-destructively observe the state of the particle before the future cause of the present effect.
Maybe you should do a cursory search before accusing someone of being a kook. Well you can look up the academic papers yourself. Here is Price's first major paper on the topic. It's published in Mind, which is quite the respectable journal. And yes, it's philosophy, not pure physics. Price also has plenty of other works indexed by Google Scholar.
Anyway, I don't understand your argument against my characterization that free will is a moral property. What's "forcing" you to do anything? Is it your physical system of particles typically referred to as the "brain"? If so, wouldn't you want this "determining" what you do rather than something else that is external to yourself?
I say it's a moral property because that is the only valid reason to care about whether an action was "free" or not. "Free will" as a theoretical construct has no place in neurology, psychology, sociology, or anything that studies how, in fact, the world actually is. The only reason we care if some action is "free" is to properly assign blame. We do not blame the man who performed an immoral act with a gun to his back, because he was not free to act as he chose.
One might be inclined to say that we can easily determine the behavior of invalids and the like, thus they lack free will. And then one can wonder whether in the presence of an intelligence much greater than our own we will be seen as just as determinable. But this is all silly. We "determine" other people's motives and actions all the time. It is a rare day that a close friend or coworker does something unpredictable.
And has been said many times, unpredictability is no solace. Why should I derive any comfort from the idea that there's some true randomness inherent in my decision making, whether this is brought about by quantum mechanics or just a random number generator in my head? I may as well be a piece on a monopoly board who's next move is determined by a die roll, if you want to look at it that way.
And so why isn't the robot free? Anyway, assume that humans have souls that exist in some other metaphysical realm that actually controls what we think and do. Why does that make our actions any more free? Why does it matter if our human bodies are puppets of some immaterial soul or if the means for rational thought is within the bodies (brains) themselves? I can't see any good reason. There's no a priori reason some metaphysical entity couldn't fully study and determine the future actions of one's immaterial soul. In short, "determinability" doesn't mean much.
First of all, quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with free will. Free will, if understood properly, is a moral property of human agents. And whether someone is responsible for his actions has nothing to do with our final understanding of subatomic physics.
Secondly, the physics is questionable. There are several assumptions underlying Bell's inequalities. One of which is that incoming (that is, earlier in time) influences are independent. However, the fundamental laws are, for the most part, time symmetric. (The exceptions are the neutral kaon which has questionable significance and entropy, which is a supervenient law that needs to be explained by cosmic boundary conditions.)
The point is that we should not expect incoming influences to be independent. We should expect variable dependence going both ways in time. "Agency" and "observer" being primitive theoretical entities was always a metaphysical abomination. Happily, it's not necessary once the symmetry of time is fully appreciated.
I'm not saying anything new. Huw Price is the principle proponent of this view and he's not the one who came up with it either. To my knowledge there has been no serious reply to Price's proposal. So his work sits largely ignored, while media attention goes to crazy interpretations that give free will to subatomic particles, and various other metaphysical abominations.
Slander and defamation are not crimes when what is said is true.
These optimizations are nice, but leave out the most obvious and important improvement to the codecs that have yet to be made. Most processors sold nowadays are 2 or more cores. And smooth single-threaded processing of 1080p x264 is impossible on all but the absolute highest end processors. So the most important step is obvious multi-threading. There's a summer of code project for that too. I'm surprised the author of the article missed it.
How are they going to mess up your database with read-only access? They could run intensive queries, I guess. But unless you've got million+ row tables that are being accessed concurrently by tens of clients, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Anyway, just enable logging and look through what they've been doing in case it's anything stupid. I used to work for a large insurance firm and we'd get a call minutes after doing against the database we shouldn't.
And chemists are just doing heuristic physics, and biologists are just doing heuristic chemistry.
All of math reduces to logic and set theory but you don't see philosophers snubbing their noses at mathematicians. I agree that "computer science" is a misnomer in many ways, but "algorithm" in this case is not a misnomer. Yes, it's readily apparent that all algorithms can ultimately be represented mathematically, but that means no more than the reduction of math to logic.
A machine with swap enabled will always have more throughput than a machine without. It's a better use of the resources available. However, replace that swap space with the same amount of RAM, and of course that will be even better. Some use this as an argument against swap space, but it's not a fair comparison, since you can enable swap space in the RAM increased machine and increase throughput even more.
So when I think of this recommendation system, a better algorithm is like having swap space enabled. It's a more sophisticated use of the data you have. Having more data is like having more RAM. And of course the best option is to have more reference data and a better algorithm. It's not an exclusive disjunction, and it's silly to think it has to be.
Well, they can be. I tried to do SSD in a laptop by plugging a CF card into a mini-ide adapter a few years ago. The 40x or even 80x CF cards are definitely slower than hard drives. Hard drives sold as "SSD" and already shaped into a hard drive form factor do seem to be faster than regular flash media. That speed comes at a very high premium though. On newegg, a 8GB CF card costs $25-$35 at the low range. A 8GB SSD drive costs $175-$250 at the low range (for the laptop drive form factor).
In January 2007, a small court in Japan, making a judgement on yet another slander case, announced that 2channel's holding company was bankrupt and it would be repossessed. This claim was openly mocked by Hiroyuki on 2channel's splash page, and nothing of the sort happened, although 2channel's Japanese ISP ended its operations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2ch#Free_speech Basically, any website that doesn't want government regulation will just relocate its servers to the U.S. Due to the differing laws, they will not be able to subpoena IP logs or have any way of getting at the people that post to the site. The owner of the site may have some trouble if he continues living in Japan, but there will probably be ex patriots in the U.S. willing to "own" the site to avoid such trouble.
Well if you have a shared hosting account that allows ssh logins, anyone can now become root and start messing around.
Just tested on Suse x86_64 10.3, ran as local user and it dropped me into root.
Linux opteron 2.6.22.16-0.2-default #1 SMP 2008/02/01 19:36:55 UTC x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
The only interesting part of that article is in the summary, so save yourself the time it would take to get through that rambling mess.
I'm not an expert, but I've taken several courses on biologically oriented psychology and I have no idea what "biochemical friction" is supposed to be. Is that just a redundant phrase pointing to the cortisol and adrenaline released by multi-tasking, or is it a separate phenomenon?
I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that peeing in the bushes or an 18 yr old having sex with a 16 yr old deserves a place on these sex offender registries. And while such cases do sometimes end up on registries, they do not represent the "typical" sex offender. The most common crime on these registries, as far as I've seen by actually browsing through them, is child molestation. Excluding minor offenses such as the ones you mentioned seem so uncontroversial that it's not worth addressing.
I think the reverse is true. DV perpetrators tend to have anti-social personality disorder. No, that doesn't mean they are shut-ins. Those with anti-social disorder have little trouble forming relationships, partly because they have no remorse about lying. They are very good about putting on a convincing face, and then turning violent and abusive once the relationship becomes serious.
DV victims, on the other hand, tend to stay with those who abuse them. It's often the girlfriend/wife with black eyes that comes and bails out the abuser. If a database like the one proposed existed, then it could be used to pierce the facade that abusers put forth. And it could also help friends with suspicions to convince the woman the man is not as he presents himself.
Sex offenders, on the other hand, are usually incestuous, and the recidivism rate for these offenders is quite low, especially compared to the general prison population. Jump out of the bushes type of offenders are quite rare, and these people do have much higher recidivism rates.
Anecdotally, my first stepfather was physically abusive to my mother, and my second sexually abused my sister. The first, after spending time in jail for assaulting my mother and grandmother, managed to start a whole new family. Eventually, he burned down their house in an attempt to kill all of them. Luckily it was not successful. The second stepfather, after serving his sentence, does pretty much nothing except for the type of menial work a person of his status can get, spending his evenings watching TV. I don't really see him as much of a threat, not that I'd want to hang out with him.
Well salesmen rarely do this. However, imagine a UPS driver delivering 40 different packages to various parts of a city. It would be quite useful to automatically determine the order of delivery ahead of time in such a way as to minimize time and distance. As indicated in other replies to this thread, good solutions are much easier to come by than perfect solutions. The difference between the two solutions is probably not great enough to justify the immense computation power required to churn out the perfect solution. The perfect solution would probably end up costing more since you have to figure in the cost of energy used to compute it.
The submitter just wanted to be able to use google maps to find the optimal route between points on an errand run. If you limit the number of nodes to 10, then perfect solutions remain tractable. And I doubt most people would have more than 10 errands to run at once.
On a related note, I just had a Mormon missionary knocking on my door last night. Perhaps we could rename this the traveling Mormon problem. I'm sure they would appreciate automated itineraries that minimize the burden on their poor soles.
Edmond Schonberg, Ph.D., is vice-president of AdaCore and a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University. He has been involved in the implementation of Ada since 1981. With Robert Dewar and other collaborators, he created the first validated implementation of Ada83, the first prototype compiler for Ada9X, and the first full implementation of Ada2005. Maybe Ada is helpful for learning concurrent programming and safe typing, but I'll wait for the opinion of a slightly less partial party.
It doesn't matter if it was one page or ten pages, what matters is the reasonability of expectation. For example, selling a picture of an xbox in such a way as to fool bidders into paying the price of an actual xbox, is fraudulent, even if you put the fact that it's a picture at the end of a one page description.
I've done plenty of computer repair work myself, and known many people that do such work for different places. $160 is a ridiculous sum, even including labor. The average tech makes less than $15/hr, charging $85/hr is near fraudulent. Not only this, but most of the time for a job such as this is letting the OS installer run with minimal input. So that $10-$15/hr tech is typically triple charging his time as he lets multiple machines install at once. I don't know where you heard that %100 markup is fair, but I've never heard of anyone engaging in such markup for parts used in computer repair. As far as I've seen, parts are charged the same as if the customer walked into the store to just but the drive. Taking replaced parts out of warranty, even when the customer wants them back--this is just completely new to me, and I've been in the computer field for over a decade.
In the end it would come down to what the reasonable expectation is as considered by the small claims court judge. Personally, I would feel quite confident making that case myself.
Contracts require "meeting of the minds". And again, there was a reasonable expectation that he would be able to keep his old drive, given that he was paying way over retail for the new one. You can't impose any condition you please just by burying it under 10 pages of fine print. Imagine buying a new car and getting ready to drive off when the salesman says, "Oh yeah, the ten page contract you signed stipulates that we get to keep your old car," when nothing of the sort was mentioned before. While it is typical to get trade in value for a car you are replacing, no one is going to accept such a trade in unless it is explicitly mentioned and negotiated beforehand. Maybe you had planned to give the car to your son, or sell it yourself.
Similarly, it is typical that the trade in value of the old drive factors into the price of replacement and repair, but it must be made explicit. The exception is when replacing a drive under warranty. It is generally understood that a warranty guarantees you a working set of components, and so it would be expected that in replacing a component, the warranter keeps the broken unit to recover any possible remaining value and to discourage warranty fraud. However, this did not happen under warranty. The price for repair was much greater than the cost of typical drive, so there is no way that the customer could have reasonably expected that the $160 was based on the store keeping his old drive. I think the customer could easily win this in small claims court. He'd get his old drive and money back, and the store would get the replacement drive back. He could then his laptop to another store and renegotiate the repair of his laptop.
I don't see Australia shutting down any sites that aren't hosted in Australia. I remember France getting upset about some Yahoo auction items containing Nazi paraphernalia, and I think Yahoo eventually complied, but only because they wanted to keep doing business in France. I doubt 4chan has any significant business stake in Australia. Things might get interesting for sites that do have a significant business stake in Australia, however. They'll probably only do filtering if you're coming from Australia though, using the same type of detection scheme that google uses to forward you to the localized version of their site.
Why set up a dummy company? I know creative labs, for instance, has their own ebay presence, and the account name is "creative-labs" or something, with thousands of feedback. Sometimes they sell for a fixed price, sometimes they take best offers, and sometimes they start the auction at 20% below MSRP and let it go to whatever.
Bizarrely, Firefox for Windows running through wine runs faster than native Firefox. The wine installation doesn't have any add-ons though, so that might be the difference. Wine version is 0.9.51 and windows firefox version is 2.0.0.9, same machine as my post above.
Wine results. Native results.
My results were a little better than yours, maybe 25%, but still about double the time of the firefox numbers in the article. Maybe it's the extensions I have, such as linkification. Dual Opteron 252, 6GB RAM, SuSE 10.3 64-bit, firefox 2.0.0.10.