It's fair compensation because it's what Apple charges.
If they want more money, they should charge more.
A seller's intent does not enter into it. My local grocery store sells peaches for about 50 cents each, intending that they be eaten. If I buy a peach for 50 cents and instead use that peach in some mysterious way to create an invention which makes me millions of dollars, that in no way entitles the local grocery store to any more than their original 50 cents, nor does it make the situation in any way unfair to them.
Apple sets their price with the assumption that buyers will be using the product on Apple hardware. If that assumption gets broken, that's Apple's problem for making it, not the buyer's fault for breaking it.
Nonsense. Another example. Let's say that through some twist of fate I come to own a million-dollar house but have no money whatsoever. I control a fairly significant proportion of my nation's wealth, much more than the average person in my nation (at least until the property tax man comes and takes it away from me). And yet I have zero money, zero percent of my nation's currency.
Say what? The total amount of money is certainly limited. Yes, banks can create more through loans, but the legal reserve requirements make this a converging infinite series. The maximum limit is a constant multiplier on top of the "real" money supply, it does not continue without end.
As for wealth not being finite, what the hell? Everybody I know has finite wealth. The Earth is finite in extent. Stuff beyond the Earth is not yet accessible. Where is all of this infinite wealth being kept?
I create a perfect $100 bill. It is indistinguishable in every way from one printed by the government. Is there any more wealth in society from my creation? No. But there's $100 more money.
I create food. Food obviously has value, as it sustains us. There is more wealth in society from my creation. Is there any more money? No.
Now, money certainly serves an important purpose in lubricating transactions which would otherwise be essentially impossible to carry out (barter tending to be impractical in complex societies, the butcher couldn't possibly care less about the esoteric software engineering I make my living from) but it's very wrong to speak of creating wealth as being the same as creating money. It's true that money is a marker for value, but there's nothing permanent or fixed about it. The same value that's marked by $100 today could just as well be marked by $200 tomorrow (although that would tend to indicate absurd levels of inflation).
I must disagree. AppleCare can occasionally be worth it, but it is by no means the obvious choice you make it out to be. I've purchased AppleCare on, I believe, two PowerBooks. In neither case did it come anywhere close to pay off. On the second PowerBook, the HD failed about three months after the extended warranty period ran out. No benefit there.
For machines like the Mini or the Mac Pro, AppleCare makes even less sense. It can be good for the portables since they cost so much to repair if you have to pay for it yourself, but even then I'm still not sure if it's worth it in the end.
There are two really significant differences between having the police follow people around.
First, this involves actually fiddling with someone's private property. Watching a person doesn't. People would flip out if I went around sticking tracking devices to their cars, and it should be no different just because it's the police doing it. Police have very little power beyond what you and I have except when they have a warrant or when they have probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.
Second, traditional methods have inherently limited scope. A police department with 100 officers can only follow, at most, 100 people around at any given time. (Practically this number will be much smaller.) But with a cheap enough GPS tracking device (and I have no reason to believe they need to cost more than about $150) and it becomes practical to track a huge number of people. Maybe even everybody. Even if you're comfortable with the police doing this to a criminal suspect, are you comfortable with the police doing this to everyone in your town? (If the answer to that last question is "yes", then please get the hell out of my country before you break it any further.)
The budget has also increased faster than inflation. That 5% would probably still be 5%, or lower, today.
In any case, even if it were significantly greater, we could afford it. We'd just rather spend the money on other things, like occupying Middle Eastern countries.
What bullshit! The US doesn't want to pay it any more. It can certainly afford it. Bringing NASA up to Apollo levels of funding would be a virtually unnoticeable drop in the current federal budget.
That's right! No web site, anywhere, should ever talk about anything besides people dying, because people are always dying and it's always the most important thing happening.
Sheesh. You realize humans are capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time?
Right, but this assumes that things never would have changed there otherwise, which I doubt. Most countries in that part of the world have changed radically in the past 58 years, I doubt Tibet would have been any different.
Attempts to force countries to become kind and loving and happy don't usually work too well. There are a couple of counterexamples (West Germany and Japan after WWII are two) but generally they required utterly destroying the infrastructure and massacring the population beforehand. In places where you're unwilling or unable to do that (like Iraq), such attempts just piss people off and make them hate you.
That said, the whole Tibet thing seems kind of overblown. It's hardly the first, or the last, time that one country attacked and conquered another with the intent of annexing it. And in this case it was a backwards, mean place which wasn't even recognized by most countries, and with a somewhat short and uncertain history of independence from the country which eventually took it back.
It would have been better if China had left Tibet alone, but on the other hand it seems that there are worse things happening in Africa practically every day and nobody gives a shit.
If your eyesight is getting worse in a way that hard lenses can prevent, that's a clear advantage to be sure.
Again just curious, how much did your pair cost, and how much does it cost to get them cleaned and polished?
For what it's worth, I bought two large bottles of the special cleaning solution for about $17 a few months ago. So far I've used about one quarter of one bottle. There's no real work involved it using it, just sprinkle it on the lens, then dunk the lens into the stuff in the little holder and let it sit overnight. As far as losing them, I haven't lost any yet, but the potential for it is ever on my mind.
New potential motivations by Ivans are also revealed.
What do you mean new potential motivations? They're Ivans, they're trying to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, they don't need additional motivations!
Except that the vast majority of those employees are just drones who work at their retail store. The people who actually make products are surprisingly few compared to other similar high-tech companies.
And yeah, they're hiring in the sense that they're putting out job offers. But they're having a tough time actually hiring people, what with how they overwork people to death and don't pay very well.
Just curious, when you say "better", what actually makes them better?
As for longer lasting, mine last a month (although I've been cheating and using them a bit longer) before I throw them away and get new ones. The cost is like an extra ice cream cone or two per month. I have no real desire for them to last longer, especially since this makes losing them much less of a problem.
Don't be so damned dismissive. Nobody's forcing you to use them. If you prefer to stick with glasses, fine, go for it. But don't act like people who wear contacts are all crazy, or whatever. Newsflash: people are different.
Contacts are greatly superior to glasses in a couple important ways.
First, they give you a much better field of corrected vision. Almost any pair of glasses will have large gaps around the edges, and the styles popular today are particularly bad as they tend to be small. Any pair of glasses that covers the entire range that your eyeball can point will look extremely ridiculous. Practically, this means that you must move your head a lot more to see things clearly when you're wearing glasses. As a pilot, the increased field of corrected vision achieved by contact lenses is by itself sufficient advantage to justify using them.
Second, distortion. Glasses distort everything within the area that they correct. How much they distort depends exactly on how big they are and how strong they are. If you have strong, large glasses then there is significant distortion around the outside edges which can be distracting. If you instead use smaller glasses, then this is better but the field of view problem I discussed above is worse. If your glasses offer only mild correction then this isn't so important.
The "sticking something in your eye" thing is vastly overstated. It's just not a very big deal. Modern contact lenses are soft and conform to your eye's shape. They are designed to be wet and to retain water like the rest of your eye. When they are in it is difficult to feel that they are there, although if you are nearsighted then you can often feel the rim of the lenses as your eyes move. This feeling is not uncomfortable once you get used to it, which just takes a few minutes the first time you use them, and decreases to zero as you continue to wear them. Getting them in and out is also not a big deal once you practice it a bit. My first week started out with each morning and night being an adventure in getting the lenses in and out, and by the end of the week it was pretty easy. Now it takes me just a few seconds per eye and there is no discomfort. Done properly, your fingers only ever touch the lens, not your eye. So the eye only touches the lens, which is wet and made from a material that doesn't irritate the eye.
I regularly wear both, and I can tell you that the problems with glasses are just as big as the problems with contact lenses, it's just that you're used to the glasses and contact lenses are foreign to you. Sometimes if I wear my contacts for a couple of days straight, switching to glasses makes me dizzy for a few minutes due to the distortion. You got used to that distortion, and you'll get used to contacts if you care to try them. Personally I recommend it.
Sounds like the problems were a combination of the quake exceeding the design limits, the codes not being enforced universally, and just plain bad luck. It certainly doesn't surprise me that buildings aren't constructed entirely to code, but on the other hand this is nowhere near a new problem in China.
Could probably make some decent money if you figured out a way to put all the functionality together into a little box that Joe could just plug in and use.
Seems to me that this is the fundamental problem with these fancy Asterisk setups: anybody who can set them up isn't popular enough to make use of them!
And I say this in all good fun as one of those guys who isn't popular enough to make use of them....
And hopefully that means that they will lose the case. (Actually, I'd hope that anyone bringing such a suit would lose, not just governmental entities.) But this is just an injunction. An injunction is temporary, and is only intended to prevent potential damage from being done until the true merits of the case can be assessed. An injunction doesn't require a good case, it just requires a case that has sufficient merit to go to court.
Personally I don't think this injunction should have been granted, but it's not nearly the slam dunk obvious thing that many people here think it is.
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It's fair compensation because it's what Apple charges.
If they want more money, they should charge more.
A seller's intent does not enter into it. My local grocery store sells peaches for about 50 cents each, intending that they be eaten. If I buy a peach for 50 cents and instead use that peach in some mysterious way to create an invention which makes me millions of dollars, that in no way entitles the local grocery store to any more than their original 50 cents, nor does it make the situation in any way unfair to them.
Apple sets their price with the assumption that buyers will be using the product on Apple hardware. If that assumption gets broken, that's Apple's problem for making it, not the buyer's fault for breaking it.
Nonsense. Another example. Let's say that through some twist of fate I come to own a million-dollar house but have no money whatsoever. I control a fairly significant proportion of my nation's wealth, much more than the average person in my nation (at least until the property tax man comes and takes it away from me). And yet I have zero money, zero percent of my nation's currency.
Yeah, let's not bother to understand anything, let's just spout meaningless mindless-liberal-sounding phrases to win group approval!
Say what? The total amount of money is certainly limited. Yes, banks can create more through loans, but the legal reserve requirements make this a converging infinite series. The maximum limit is a constant multiplier on top of the "real" money supply, it does not continue without end.
As for wealth not being finite, what the hell? Everybody I know has finite wealth. The Earth is finite in extent. Stuff beyond the Earth is not yet accessible. Where is all of this infinite wealth being kept?
Money and wealth are unrelated.
Want proof? Consider these two examples.
I create a perfect $100 bill. It is indistinguishable in every way from one printed by the government. Is there any more wealth in society from my creation? No. But there's $100 more money.
I create food. Food obviously has value, as it sustains us. There is more wealth in society from my creation. Is there any more money? No.
Now, money certainly serves an important purpose in lubricating transactions which would otherwise be essentially impossible to carry out (barter tending to be impractical in complex societies, the butcher couldn't possibly care less about the esoteric software engineering I make my living from) but it's very wrong to speak of creating wealth as being the same as creating money. It's true that money is a marker for value, but there's nothing permanent or fixed about it. The same value that's marked by $100 today could just as well be marked by $200 tomorrow (although that would tend to indicate absurd levels of inflation).
I must disagree. AppleCare can occasionally be worth it, but it is by no means the obvious choice you make it out to be. I've purchased AppleCare on, I believe, two PowerBooks. In neither case did it come anywhere close to pay off. On the second PowerBook, the HD failed about three months after the extended warranty period ran out. No benefit there.
For machines like the Mini or the Mac Pro, AppleCare makes even less sense. It can be good for the portables since they cost so much to repair if you have to pay for it yourself, but even then I'm still not sure if it's worth it in the end.
There are two really significant differences between having the police follow people around.
First, this involves actually fiddling with someone's private property. Watching a person doesn't. People would flip out if I went around sticking tracking devices to their cars, and it should be no different just because it's the police doing it. Police have very little power beyond what you and I have except when they have a warrant or when they have probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.
Second, traditional methods have inherently limited scope. A police department with 100 officers can only follow, at most, 100 people around at any given time. (Practically this number will be much smaller.) But with a cheap enough GPS tracking device (and I have no reason to believe they need to cost more than about $150) and it becomes practical to track a huge number of people. Maybe even everybody. Even if you're comfortable with the police doing this to a criminal suspect, are you comfortable with the police doing this to everyone in your town? (If the answer to that last question is "yes", then please get the hell out of my country before you break it any further.)
The budget has also increased faster than inflation. That 5% would probably still be 5%, or lower, today.
In any case, even if it were significantly greater, we could afford it. We'd just rather spend the money on other things, like occupying Middle Eastern countries.
The US can't afford it any more.
What bullshit! The US doesn't want to pay it any more. It can certainly afford it. Bringing NASA up to Apollo levels of funding would be a virtually unnoticeable drop in the current federal budget.
That's right! No web site, anywhere, should ever talk about anything besides people dying, because people are always dying and it's always the most important thing happening.
Sheesh. You realize humans are capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time?
Right, but this assumes that things never would have changed there otherwise, which I doubt. Most countries in that part of the world have changed radically in the past 58 years, I doubt Tibet would have been any different.
Yeah, pretty much.
Attempts to force countries to become kind and loving and happy don't usually work too well. There are a couple of counterexamples (West Germany and Japan after WWII are two) but generally they required utterly destroying the infrastructure and massacring the population beforehand. In places where you're unwilling or unable to do that (like Iraq), such attempts just piss people off and make them hate you.
That said, the whole Tibet thing seems kind of overblown. It's hardly the first, or the last, time that one country attacked and conquered another with the intent of annexing it. And in this case it was a backwards, mean place which wasn't even recognized by most countries, and with a somewhat short and uncertain history of independence from the country which eventually took it back.
It would have been better if China had left Tibet alone, but on the other hand it seems that there are worse things happening in Africa practically every day and nobody gives a shit.
If your eyesight is getting worse in a way that hard lenses can prevent, that's a clear advantage to be sure.
Again just curious, how much did your pair cost, and how much does it cost to get them cleaned and polished?
For what it's worth, I bought two large bottles of the special cleaning solution for about $17 a few months ago. So far I've used about one quarter of one bottle. There's no real work involved it using it, just sprinkle it on the lens, then dunk the lens into the stuff in the little holder and let it sit overnight. As far as losing them, I haven't lost any yet, but the potential for it is ever on my mind.
New potential motivations by Ivans are also revealed.
What do you mean new potential motivations? They're Ivans, they're trying to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, they don't need additional motivations!
(P.S. the guy's name is spelled Ivins.)
Except that the vast majority of those employees are just drones who work at their retail store. The people who actually make products are surprisingly few compared to other similar high-tech companies.
And yeah, they're hiring in the sense that they're putting out job offers. But they're having a tough time actually hiring people, what with how they overwork people to death and don't pay very well.
Just curious, when you say "better", what actually makes them better?
As for longer lasting, mine last a month (although I've been cheating and using them a bit longer) before I throw them away and get new ones. The cost is like an extra ice cream cone or two per month. I have no real desire for them to last longer, especially since this makes losing them much less of a problem.
Don't be so damned dismissive. Nobody's forcing you to use them. If you prefer to stick with glasses, fine, go for it. But don't act like people who wear contacts are all crazy, or whatever. Newsflash: people are different.
Contacts are greatly superior to glasses in a couple important ways.
First, they give you a much better field of corrected vision. Almost any pair of glasses will have large gaps around the edges, and the styles popular today are particularly bad as they tend to be small. Any pair of glasses that covers the entire range that your eyeball can point will look extremely ridiculous. Practically, this means that you must move your head a lot more to see things clearly when you're wearing glasses. As a pilot, the increased field of corrected vision achieved by contact lenses is by itself sufficient advantage to justify using them.
Second, distortion. Glasses distort everything within the area that they correct. How much they distort depends exactly on how big they are and how strong they are. If you have strong, large glasses then there is significant distortion around the outside edges which can be distracting. If you instead use smaller glasses, then this is better but the field of view problem I discussed above is worse. If your glasses offer only mild correction then this isn't so important.
The "sticking something in your eye" thing is vastly overstated. It's just not a very big deal. Modern contact lenses are soft and conform to your eye's shape. They are designed to be wet and to retain water like the rest of your eye. When they are in it is difficult to feel that they are there, although if you are nearsighted then you can often feel the rim of the lenses as your eyes move. This feeling is not uncomfortable once you get used to it, which just takes a few minutes the first time you use them, and decreases to zero as you continue to wear them. Getting them in and out is also not a big deal once you practice it a bit. My first week started out with each morning and night being an adventure in getting the lenses in and out, and by the end of the week it was pretty easy. Now it takes me just a few seconds per eye and there is no discomfort. Done properly, your fingers only ever touch the lens, not your eye. So the eye only touches the lens, which is wet and made from a material that doesn't irritate the eye.
I regularly wear both, and I can tell you that the problems with glasses are just as big as the problems with contact lenses, it's just that you're used to the glasses and contact lenses are foreign to you. Sometimes if I wear my contacts for a couple of days straight, switching to glasses makes me dizzy for a few minutes due to the distortion. You got used to that distortion, and you'll get used to contacts if you care to try them. Personally I recommend it.
That's a good example I hadn't thought of. Thanks!
Thanks, that was an interesting article.
Sounds like the problems were a combination of the quake exceeding the design limits, the codes not being enforced universally, and just plain bad luck. It certainly doesn't surprise me that buildings aren't constructed entirely to code, but on the other hand this is nowhere near a new problem in China.
Could probably make some decent money if you figured out a way to put all the functionality together into a little box that Joe could just plug in and use.
Seems to me that this is the fundamental problem with these fancy Asterisk setups: anybody who can set them up isn't popular enough to make use of them!
And I say this in all good fun as one of those guys who isn't popular enough to make use of them....
And hopefully that means that they will lose the case. (Actually, I'd hope that anyone bringing such a suit would lose, not just governmental entities.) But this is just an injunction. An injunction is temporary, and is only intended to prevent potential damage from being done until the true merits of the case can be assessed. An injunction doesn't require a good case, it just requires a case that has sufficient merit to go to court.
Personally I don't think this injunction should have been granted, but it's not nearly the slam dunk obvious thing that many people here think it is.
Fuck off and stop being such an asshole just because you're anonymous.
The MBTA filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from giving the talk.
The action in question is clearly part of a civil suit. Just because you don't like it don't mean it ain't so.
Same way that slander and libel are actionable. Namely, the first amendment, in general, protects against criminal prosecution but not civil suits.