The fact that something would have to infringe greatly on a copyright in order to exist does not make it actually legal to create without permission. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Barely any plot, and a deus-ex-machina ending which anybody over the mental age of eight could've seen coming long before the story's midpoint. I don't think "deus ex machina" means what you think it means.
1. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation. 2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. 3. A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty. So you see, the idea of a deus ex machina ending which anyone could see coming at the midpoint of the book is a contradiction in terms.
Apple charges a 100-200% markup on RAM and HD upgrades. Do you think that anyone who pays this markup is not a fool?
I'll be the first person to say that the situation with Apple's RAM and HD upgrades sucks. It's stupid and it makes them look bad. But what it does not do is limit your buying options. Aftermarket parts are trivial to install, are vastly cheaper, and often have a better warranty than what you'd get on identical parts from Apple. It's lame, but also inconsequential.
I understand all of this and accept your point. But in your last post you rejected the idea of the $2300 Mac Pro and refused to accept any model which wasn't totally loaded to the gills, and thus had an enormously high price. This is completely incompatible with complaining that there is no mid-range Mac, which would of course have lower specs than the Mac Pro, not higher.
Flight training in simulators can be good if you're flying planes which carry dozens or hundreds of people, or if you're practicing the mental aspects like working with instruments, handling emergency procedures, etc. But for learning the physical skills of flying a small plane, simulators are actually counterproductive. Not only do they fail to reproduce the feel and response of a real small aircraft, but they produce an entirely different feel which results in the student learning the wrong thing.
Driving in a video game is likely to have the same problem. Simulated drunk driving with a game controller is going to be almost but not quite entirely unlike real drunk driving with a steering wheel.
Sorry, but you do not get to complain about the lack of a midrange Mac and simultaneously refuse to accept any Mac Pro with less than 8 cores, 8GB of RAM, an internal RAID, eSATA, and a second optical drive. Come on, now!
You said four cores, so select the four core option: minus $500, taking you to $2300. 2GB is just fine. It's not fantastic, but it does the job. If you absolutely must upgrade, toss in a 4GB upgrade kit for $170. Now your total price is $2470. You have a decent 320GB hard drive, a fine optical drive, and a fine GPU. You certainly may want to upgrade the rest, but complaining about the lack of a midrange Mac and then claiming that the lowest-end Mac Pro is "unusable" is totally asinine.
1) Highway robbery for RAM/HDs from their website That's why you buy the extra RAM/HD elsewhere. If you buy extra RAM from Apple then you're a fool.
2) Bank robbery for their hard drive prices for XServe I haven't bought any XServes but I assume they can also be obtained elsewhere.
3) Spreadsheet performance (Excel 2008, OOo 2.4, Numbers '08) That's what you get for using spreadsheets!
4) Closed, shitty file formats for their iWork and iLife products Well, um, so there!
5) Pain in the ass to install free *nix software Fink and MacPorts make this as easy as it is on any other *nix. The only difficulty is choosing between the two.
Those are all good points. The trouble, of course, is that I'm trying to be totally logical whereas most people aren't, and that's just how things are. I don't think the man's crazed testimony should have influenced things, but there's no doubt that it did.
A lot of emotion comes into play with these things and it isn't even necessarily wrong. My opinion could be entirely reversed if I had been physically present at the trial.
Yeah, there was a bunch of explainable circumstantial evidence, and some blood that could have come from all sorts of activities. Maybe my standards of proof are too high. I don't work with the justice system at all, much less on murder cases, so I don't know how these things work in the real world. The way I see it the evidence seems to be far too light to support the accusation.
Don't you think it's a little dishonest to accuse us of sticking up for a murderer when the whole point is that we think he didn't do it? It's not like we're defending a guy who we think actually killed somebody and are just sticking it to The Man.
As for other cases, this one is on slashdot, the other one you mention was not, so it would be pretty hard to whine about that case here.
I don't understand why you start your post with "No". What you say is otherwise very good, but it's also perfectly compatible with what I said, so there's no reason to begin with disagreement.
Yes, he talked himself into jail. Yes, he's an arrogant jerk who screwed himself on the witness stand. Does that somehow add to the evidence against him? No, it does not. Does that make this outcome any less disturbing? No, it does not. The idea that lying is somehow proof of guilt is plenty disturbing all on its own.
To me, the evidence can just as easily point to a guy who went nuts and started doing a whole bunch of strange things after his wife disappeared. The whole case seems to be extremely weak, and that's why a lot of people here are defending him. There seems to be plenty of room for reasonable doubt with the evidence at hand.
So, we don't know how he killed her, or where, or even if she's dead, but hey, this guy is weird, has some blood in his car, and she hasn't been found. Clearly this proves that he is guilty!
In theory (not necessarily reality, hence inflation) there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. (read money) So what builds wealth for some ALWAYS takes wealth from someone else. Back to inflation... Governments and people try "creating" more wealth, but this just results in the devaluation of all existing wealth to achieve equilibrium. You're confusing wealth with money.
Basically all of economics is built around the idea that a willing, informed trade creates wealth. How does this happen? Because different things have different values to different people. If I'm a brewer and I have thousands of gallons of beer sitting around, this doesn't do me much good. If I sell it to you, you then have beer where you didn't have beer before. If you thought that the price was worth it, then your wealth has increased, because you consider the beer to be more valuable than the money. I on the other hand consider the money to be more valuable than the beer, because I already have more beer than I personally need. Thus we both benefit.
Wealth can also be created without trade. If I cultivate land, I create food where there was no food before. This food is wealth which has been created without using up any other wealth.
To apply this to the question at hand, consider the continuing urbanization of the human race. In 1890, 50% of the American population were farmers. Today less than 1% are farmers. All those people who left the farms and went to the cities are workers taken away from food production. If wealth cannot be created then this should have been devastating to the nation. But in fact the opposite is true. These workers were more productive in their new jobs, created more wealth, and allowed the fewer remaining farmers to create more food. The net result is that a vastly smaller number of farmers are able to create a vastly greater amount of food, and thus wealth, than before.
As for poor people benefitting from higher food prices, this assumes that poor people are farmers who make money from selling food. This assumption is wrong in two ways. First, there are a lot of poor people who aren't farmers. Second, there are a lot of poor farmers who are subsistence farmers, who are only able to grow enough to feed themselves, not enough to sell.
It's possible that increased food prices will be a good thing in the long term for poor regions of the world. Africa, for example, has a lot of problems because food from the outside world is often cheaper than native production, which puts farmers out of work and creates poverty. But it's a very complicated question that can't be glossed over by the original statement that poor people will benefit because poor people grow their own food.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that something would have to infringe greatly on a copyright in order to exist does not make it actually legal to create without permission. Quite the opposite, in fact.
2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.
3. A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty. So you see, the idea of a deus ex machina ending which anyone could see coming at the midpoint of the book is a contradiction in terms.
Apple charges a 100-200% markup on RAM and HD upgrades. Do you think that anyone who pays this markup is not a fool?
I'll be the first person to say that the situation with Apple's RAM and HD upgrades sucks. It's stupid and it makes them look bad. But what it does not do is limit your buying options. Aftermarket parts are trivial to install, are vastly cheaper, and often have a better warranty than what you'd get on identical parts from Apple. It's lame, but also inconsequential.
I understand all of this and accept your point. But in your last post you rejected the idea of the $2300 Mac Pro and refused to accept any model which wasn't totally loaded to the gills, and thus had an enormously high price. This is completely incompatible with complaining that there is no mid-range Mac, which would of course have lower specs than the Mac Pro, not higher.
Flight training in simulators can be good if you're flying planes which carry dozens or hundreds of people, or if you're practicing the mental aspects like working with instruments, handling emergency procedures, etc. But for learning the physical skills of flying a small plane, simulators are actually counterproductive. Not only do they fail to reproduce the feel and response of a real small aircraft, but they produce an entirely different feel which results in the student learning the wrong thing.
Driving in a video game is likely to have the same problem. Simulated drunk driving with a game controller is going to be almost but not quite entirely unlike real drunk driving with a steering wheel.
(And yes, I am a pilot.)
Sorry, but you do not get to complain about the lack of a midrange Mac and simultaneously refuse to accept any Mac Pro with less than 8 cores, 8GB of RAM, an internal RAID, eSATA, and a second optical drive. Come on, now!
You said four cores, so select the four core option: minus $500, taking you to $2300. 2GB is just fine. It's not fantastic, but it does the job. If you absolutely must upgrade, toss in a 4GB upgrade kit for $170. Now your total price is $2470. You have a decent 320GB hard drive, a fine optical drive, and a fine GPU. You certainly may want to upgrade the rest, but complaining about the lack of a midrange Mac and then claiming that the lowest-end Mac Pro is "unusable" is totally asinine.
If your car costs less than $2300 then it's probably safe to say that you are not Apple's target market.
1) Highway robbery for RAM/HDs from their website That's why you buy the extra RAM/HD elsewhere. If you buy extra RAM from Apple then you're a fool. 2) Bank robbery for their hard drive prices for XServe I haven't bought any XServes but I assume they can also be obtained elsewhere. 3) Spreadsheet performance (Excel 2008, OOo 2.4, Numbers '08) That's what you get for using spreadsheets! 4) Closed, shitty file formats for their iWork and iLife products Well, um, so there! 5) Pain in the ass to install free *nix software Fink and MacPorts make this as easy as it is on any other *nix. The only difficulty is choosing between the two.
People die all the time. Are you saying that we should never do anything except discuss them?
Those are all good points. The trouble, of course, is that I'm trying to be totally logical whereas most people aren't, and that's just how things are. I don't think the man's crazed testimony should have influenced things, but there's no doubt that it did.
A lot of emotion comes into play with these things and it isn't even necessarily wrong. My opinion could be entirely reversed if I had been physically present at the trial.
Yeah, there was a bunch of explainable circumstantial evidence, and some blood that could have come from all sorts of activities. Maybe my standards of proof are too high. I don't work with the justice system at all, much less on murder cases, so I don't know how these things work in the real world. The way I see it the evidence seems to be far too light to support the accusation.
Don't you think it's a little dishonest to accuse us of sticking up for a murderer when the whole point is that we think he didn't do it? It's not like we're defending a guy who we think actually killed somebody and are just sticking it to The Man.
As for other cases, this one is on slashdot, the other one you mention was not, so it would be pretty hard to whine about that case here.
I don't understand why you start your post with "No". What you say is otherwise very good, but it's also perfectly compatible with what I said, so there's no reason to begin with disagreement.
Yes, he talked himself into jail. Yes, he's an arrogant jerk who screwed himself on the witness stand. Does that somehow add to the evidence against him? No, it does not. Does that make this outcome any less disturbing? No, it does not. The idea that lying is somehow proof of guilt is plenty disturbing all on its own.
To me, the evidence can just as easily point to a guy who went nuts and started doing a whole bunch of strange things after his wife disappeared. The whole case seems to be extremely weak, and that's why a lot of people here are defending him. There seems to be plenty of room for reasonable doubt with the evidence at hand.
So, we don't know how he killed her, or where, or even if she's dead, but hey, this guy is weird, has some blood in his car, and she hasn't been found. Clearly this proves that he is guilty!
This outcome disturbs me.