The US Government is answerable to the voters and supposedly bound by the Constitution (and stuff like FOIA).
In the absence of Government the Corporations wouldn't have to care about such niceties as votes and Constitutions, FOIA, etc.
The voters have been voting the politicians in. So if an elected Government keeps screwing up, it is at least partly the voters fault.
If you think the voters haven't been voting wisely at the ballot box every few years/months, it would be strange to expect them to vote wisely with their wallets every day to influence Corporations.
The reason why credit cards are safer in practice is because the judge and jury know they aren't safe at all:).
You can go to the court and say "It wasn't me, some hacker stole my credit card", and that's pretty believable. Happens all the time.
Whereas with some "fancy foolproof crypto-tech" the court might be more likely to believe the Bank/Merchant when they say you were responsible for the fraudulent transactions.
A lot of "Identity Theft" is actually people cheating the bank (bank fraud), but the Banks call it "identity theft" to shift some suffering and losses to YOU.
Perhaps with this sort of tech the levels of fraud will go down a lot and the banks etc will pass the savings to the customers. What do you think?;)
Go to "Specifications", "Features". It says in bold: "Region-Free for DVD discs".
It doesn't say Region Free for Blu-ray discs in another line.
There is definitely a difference between the two, and the fact that it specifically states DVD discs and not just "Region Free" makes me believe that it is not region free blu-ray.
Better for him to get it from a Region/Zone A country, than to waste yet more time and money.
There's another difference which makes DVDs more easily playable.
You can easily buy _cheap_ multi-region DVD players.
It's still not easy to find cheap multi zone Blu-ray players.
I know some guy who buys lots of original stuff (especially shelves of anime) and he lives in NZ.
The trouble is most english sub-titled bluray anime releases are in the wrong zone for NZ blu-ray players!
So he had to go to a different country to buy a bluray player and take it back... I told him he shouldn't support such idiocy, but he just had to buy one.
Who gets hurt by this bullshit? Good customers like him. Those people downloading MKVs aren't hurt:).
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
A better solution is not to ban, but instead to tax or increase license costs to places that want to allow smoking.
Set the levels high/low enough so the smokers can have places where they can smoke the whole night and kill themselves faster. While people who don't want to breathe in smoke also have places to go.
And the Gov can have extra tax money to waste/spend:).
If you haven't noticed the US currency has indeed devalued over the years and decades.
How much clearer can I be? When the Federal Reserve creates money, they become richer and everyone else with positive amounts of USD becomes poorer.
If the Federal Reserve hands that wealth to the US people directly or indirectly, the US people become richer than those in the rest of the world. If the created money is used wisely, the USA benefits.
If you haven't realized they've created more than 9 trillion USD recently. Just because they don't use the word "print" or "create" doesn't mean it isn't happening. Of course they can't use those words.
Do you really think those 9 trillion USD existed before they "loaned" them out ? Go do the math and think about it. And what were the interest rates and terms on those loans?
"Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the dollar sign ($); the words dollar, USA, Liberty, Trust in God (instead of In God We Trust); and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage.
That's pretty stupid. Heck I suspect Hasbro would sue him too if he tried a similar thing with their money.
He can create his own currency if he wants, but he should use his own slogans, marks and brands.
So as far as I'm concerned he's clearly at fault there.
Thing is if people stop having jobs they stop being able to buy stuff from Amazon.
Unless as you say, there is massive Welfare. In which case people could spend their "Allowances" to buy stuff they like from Amazon or elsewhere.
Many of the EU countries already have massive Welfare and universal healthcare so if there ever is a future where robots do most of the work their migration path isn't so difficult.
Inflation is just another way for Governments/Banks to tax people with net positive amounts of the inflated currency.
Imagine if everyone was buying, selling, borrowing or lending in "xtokens". And I was the only person who could create xtokens.
Whenever I create xtokens, everyone else becomes poorer (except those who owe amounts of xtokens). But those who owe large amounts of xtokens and can actually repay have to keep in mind that while they do become less poor, their income is in xtokens, and may not grow as fast as inflation increases their costs. So their cash flow could drop to nothing.
As long as the rest of the world uses trillions of US dollars, the USA can create US dollars and make themselves richer than the rest of the world.
So inflation was/is certainly a good thing for the USA. Because by inflating they keep getting richer than the rest of the world - there is always a lag between the US creating money and the rest of world noticing that stuff somehow should be priced higher and then adjusting their price lists;).
But guess what happens when the rest of the world stops using US dollars? If more and more countries start doing what these 5 countries are doing, the USA can say bye bye to their "make money fast" scheme.
The less the rest of the world uses the US dollar, the worse it becomes for the USA. This is actually a serious issue for the USA.
Analogy: in Zimbabwe when Mugabe printed lots of Zimbabwe dollars, he was basically taxing everyone who held Zimbabwe dollars. He transferred wealth from them to him and his cronies (who I assume got some of it). The rest of the world mostly didn't care or laughed because they didn't use Zimbabwe dollars.
The rest of the world however is living in USA's "Zimbabwe" because petroleum, grain, CPUs, country-sized loans and lots of other stuff are all in US dollars. Many countries hold billions or trillions in US dollars to trade stuff with each other.
So in the past the US could create money at will and thus "tax" the rest of the world ( everyone who holds net positive amounts of US dollars including net creditors[1]). They could spend the created money on big projects and pay (or owe) the rest of the world in US dollars for oil, food, toys etc. As long as they didn't over do it, nobody seemed to notice or care.
Recently the US created trillions of US dollars (google for Federal Reserve trillions) but rather than the money going into making most of the USA richer, those trillions went to bail-out cronies who lost/siphoned/wasted trillions in the first place.
The rest of the world is probably starting to notice that created trillions whether directly or indirectly, hence they are switching from the US dollar. They cannot switch too fast because if they start a panic, their billions or more in US dollars could become worth even less.
[1] Take China as an example. The USA owes China trillions. Foolish people think that means the USA is screwed. But imagine if Hasbro owed their suppliers millions in Monopoly money. Who really is screwed here? Creating US dollars in computers is a lot cheaper than printing Monopoly money;).
The USA is only screwed if China says, you can't owe us in US dollars any more. It has to be paid in Euro or RMB.
I've no idea why it doesn't work, and from the Google searches I've seen, I'm not the only one. For example I have many text files in a directory and subdirectories, and I'm looking for a word, that I know is in some of them. Windows 7 doesn't find any of them. The insidious thing is it works for some stuff! Maybe one day I'll figure it out, or I may think I've figured it out but it has started working for some other reason;).
The park bench, and globe help very few people in the world. The top half of that page is pretty much useless and wasted space.
Normal users will want to be able to see a list of wireless networks, and be able to select one to connect to, and be prompted for a password (or username and password) if necessary.
They just need a simple way to share a folder (can already do that with explorer), and access a folder on a remote machine. They already can do that with "Network Neighborhood".
The homegroup stuff? As far as I know, once you have many PCs, the normal users either make do with the simple stuff or find someone who knows some stuff.
As for helping the expert users, I've seen someone using a 3rd party tool to more quickly reconfigure default routes and ip addresses on interfaces quickly. That should not be necessary, stuff like that should be built in.
FWIW I don't like Ubuntu's "Network Manager" either - it doesn't seem to work reliably or predictably (DHCP sometimes doesn't get an IP). I often resort to "ifconfig".
Because Windows 7 is still worse than XP in some areas.
1) I (and my colleague) still haven't got Windows 7 search to work. It regularly doesn't find stuff in _text_ files, even if you click search in file contents, or jump through all the hoops people suggest on Google.
Having to resort to 3rd party tools in Windows 7 is ridiculous, because Windows XP's search works even though it is slow.
2) Windows 7 also has lots of useless clutter on many configuration screens (e.g. network config). Icons that mean nothing to anyone. They don't help the normal users, nor do they help the expert users who now have to click more to do stuff that was easier in Windows XP.
What would help the normal users would be config screens designed for phone support, so that tech support can guide them over the phone more easily;). e.g. "click on A1 and type 10.1.1.1".
Most normal users don't care about understanding what is going on. They just want stuff to work. So having some icon to tell them stuff is useless. Because if stuff seems to work, they won't notice it, if stuff doesn't work the icon is useless/redundant to them. They're going to call someone and ask for help. It is harder to describe an icon over the phone.
3) The UAC security stuff is just one more way to shove blame to the users. It doesn't help them at all. How are users (expert or not) to know whether to give an application admin access or not? That's harder in practice to solve than the halting problem (no access to source code, no idea of the program's full inputs). After nearly a decade Microsoft could have done better than that.
What I do like about Windows 7 is the grouping of task buttons by application. And the ability to control sound volume on a per app basis (but it's still a bit clumsy).
If they weren't hackers and just normal users using it "normally" it's pretty damning.
It's like 5 out of 11 people trying out a TV and having it crash/hang for them. That is terrible. Just imagine what else would be broken (just not crashing).
unity would be crap even if only 1 out of 11 experienced a crash.
1 out of 100 = ready if the boss yells "ship or we die".
1 out of 1000 = you're starting to get to the region where the hardware (other people's bugs) is more likely to crash your stuff.
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The US Government is answerable to the voters and supposedly bound by the Constitution (and stuff like FOIA).
In the absence of Government the Corporations wouldn't have to care about such niceties as votes and Constitutions, FOIA, etc.
The voters have been voting the politicians in. So if an elected Government keeps screwing up, it is at least partly the voters fault.
If you think the voters haven't been voting wisely at the ballot box every few years/months, it would be strange to expect them to vote wisely with their wallets every day to influence Corporations.
The reason why credit cards are safer in practice is because the judge and jury know they aren't safe at all :).
;)
You can go to the court and say "It wasn't me, some hacker stole my credit card", and that's pretty believable. Happens all the time.
Whereas with some "fancy foolproof crypto-tech" the court might be more likely to believe the Bank/Merchant when they say you were responsible for the fraudulent transactions.
A lot of "Identity Theft" is actually people cheating the bank (bank fraud), but the Banks call it "identity theft" to shift some suffering and losses to YOU.
Perhaps with this sort of tech the levels of fraud will go down a lot and the banks etc will pass the savings to the customers. What do you think?
But your car does ;).
The difference is that in your car's normal operating environment oxygen is easily available and doesn't need to be stored.
Go to "Specifications", "Features". It says in bold:
"Region-Free for DVD discs".
It doesn't say Region Free for Blu-ray discs in another line.
There is definitely a difference between the two, and the fact that it specifically states DVD discs and not just "Region Free" makes me believe that it is not region free blu-ray.
Better for him to get it from a Region/Zone A country, than to waste yet more time and money.
UK and Australia are in the same Blu-Ray region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blu-ray_regions_with_key.png
Japan and USA are in a different region from New Zealand.
The Samsung drives I bought run at 5400RPM.
These run cooler and quieter than 7200 rpm drives, but have slower random seek times.
Nowadays a lot of them are quite crap and it's not easy to tell which batches/vendors are good.
So what some people do is buy the drives that don't lie too much, even if they are actually less reliable.
e.g. when the SMART stuff says there are errors, the drive is going to die soon.
When the SMART stuff says things are hunkydory, the drive is very very unlikely to die soon.
The HDD magnets are strong. But the platters aren't even weak magnets.
Many are voters. So the options are help make them wiser, exploit them, or live with the consequences.
I see a fair number especially at the top have taken the #2 option.
I believe there are very many voters out there who see people like Sarah Palin and say "hey she's like me, so I'd vote for her!".
How voters would go "Hey that person has integrity, is smarter and wiser than me, and so should get my vote".
There's another difference which makes DVDs more easily playable.
:).
You can easily buy _cheap_ multi-region DVD players.
It's still not easy to find cheap multi zone Blu-ray players.
I know some guy who buys lots of original stuff (especially shelves of anime) and he lives in NZ.
The trouble is most english sub-titled bluray anime releases are in the wrong zone for NZ blu-ray players!
So he had to go to a different country to buy a bluray player and take it back... I told him he shouldn't support such idiocy, but he just had to buy one.
Who gets hurt by this bullshit? Good customers like him. Those people downloading MKVs aren't hurt
A better solution is not to ban, but instead to tax or increase license costs to places that want to allow smoking.
:).
Set the levels high/low enough so the smokers can have places where they can smoke the whole night and kill themselves faster. While people who don't want to breathe in smoke also have places to go.
And the Gov can have extra tax money to waste/spend
Uh that's like saying that if Hasbro owes China lots of money payable in Monopoly money that means China owns Hasbro.
;).
Another thing it's cheaper for the US Gov to create US dollars than it is for Hasbro to print Monopoly money
Maybe you have a more accurate chart than this one?
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=USDEUR=X+Interactive#symbol=;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=;
Assuming the chart is right, in 2000, one USD could get you 0.97 EUR.
Today in 2011 one USD can only get you 0.70 EUR.
If the above is correct it doesn't matter what you say about M1 or M2. It means the USD has weakened against the EUR from 2000 to 2010/2011.
Don't need any fancy math to figure it out.
If there really have been more euros created and yet the USD dollar has grown weaker against the Euro, go figure what that means...
Me miss the point?
If you haven't noticed the US currency has indeed devalued over the years and decades.
How much clearer can I be? When the Federal Reserve creates money, they become richer and everyone else with positive amounts of USD becomes poorer.
If the Federal Reserve hands that wealth to the US people directly or indirectly, the US people become richer than those in the rest of the world. If the created money is used wisely, the USA benefits.
If you haven't realized they've created more than 9 trillion USD recently. Just because they don't use the word "print" or "create" doesn't mean it isn't happening. Of course they can't use those words.
Do you really think those 9 trillion USD existed before they "loaned" them out ? Go do the math and think about it. And what were the interest rates and terms on those loans?
So have they used those trillions wisely or not?
His main problem is this:
"Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the dollar sign ($); the words dollar, USA, Liberty, Trust in God (instead of In God We Trust); and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage.
That's pretty stupid. Heck I suspect Hasbro would sue him too if he tried a similar thing with their money.
He can create his own currency if he wants, but he should use his own slogans, marks and brands.
So as far as I'm concerned he's clearly at fault there.
Even high-tech companies need janitors.
.
They may not need as many _human_ janitors if robots become cheaper.
train more people to do the work, a.
There's a limit to how much you can train an average chicken. And there is a limit for the average humans too.
The post humans are going to have to keep humans around as pets, or it's going to get pretty ugly. ;)
Of course that future may not happen - it depends on how the average human votes (but they might continue being dumb sheep headed for the slaughter).
Thing is if people stop having jobs they stop being able to buy stuff from Amazon.
Unless as you say, there is massive Welfare. In which case people could spend their "Allowances" to buy stuff they like from Amazon or elsewhere.
Many of the EU countries already have massive Welfare and universal healthcare so if there ever is a future where robots do most of the work their migration path isn't so difficult.
Inflation is just another way for Governments/Banks to tax people with net positive amounts of the inflated currency.
;).
Imagine if everyone was buying, selling, borrowing or lending in "xtokens". And I was the only person who could create xtokens.
Whenever I create xtokens, everyone else becomes poorer (except those who owe amounts of xtokens). But those who owe large amounts of xtokens and can actually repay have to keep in mind that while they do become less poor, their income is in xtokens, and may not grow as fast as inflation increases their costs. So their cash flow could drop to nothing.
As long as the rest of the world uses trillions of US dollars, the USA can create US dollars and make themselves richer than the rest of the world.
So inflation was/is certainly a good thing for the USA. Because by inflating they keep getting richer than the rest of the world - there is always a lag between the US creating money and the rest of world noticing that stuff somehow should be priced higher and then adjusting their price lists
But guess what happens when the rest of the world stops using US dollars? If more and more countries start doing what these 5 countries are doing, the USA can say bye bye to their "make money fast" scheme.
Ignorance is bliss, till the train hits you.
The less the rest of the world uses the US dollar, the worse it becomes for the USA. This is actually a serious issue for the USA.
Analogy: in Zimbabwe when Mugabe printed lots of Zimbabwe dollars, he was basically taxing everyone who held Zimbabwe dollars. He transferred wealth from them to him and his cronies (who I assume got some of it). The rest of the world mostly didn't care or laughed because they didn't use Zimbabwe dollars.
The rest of the world however is living in USA's "Zimbabwe" because petroleum, grain, CPUs, country-sized loans and lots of other stuff are all in US dollars. Many countries hold billions or trillions in US dollars to trade stuff with each other.
So in the past the US could create money at will and thus "tax" the rest of the world ( everyone who holds net positive amounts of US dollars including net creditors[1]). They could spend the created money on big projects and pay (or owe) the rest of the world in US dollars for oil, food, toys etc. As long as they didn't over do it, nobody seemed to notice or care.
Recently the US created trillions of US dollars (google for Federal Reserve trillions) but rather than the money going into making most of the USA richer, those trillions went to bail-out cronies who lost/siphoned/wasted trillions in the first place.
The rest of the world is probably starting to notice that created trillions whether directly or indirectly, hence they are switching from the US dollar. They cannot switch too fast because if they start a panic, their billions or more in US dollars could become worth even less.
[1] Take China as an example. The USA owes China trillions. Foolish people think that means the USA is screwed. But imagine if Hasbro owed their suppliers millions in Monopoly money. Who really is screwed here? Creating US dollars in computers is a lot cheaper than printing Monopoly money ;).
The USA is only screwed if China says, you can't owe us in US dollars any more. It has to be paid in Euro or RMB.
So this news is certainly bad for the USA.
I've no idea why it doesn't work, and from the Google searches I've seen, I'm not the only one. For example I have many text files in a directory and subdirectories, and I'm looking for a word, that I know is in some of them. Windows 7 doesn't find any of them. The insidious thing is it works for some stuff! Maybe one day I'll figure it out, or I may think I've figured it out but it has started working for some other reason ;).
As for useless clutter, take a look at this:
http://img.techtalkz.com/Network%20and%20Sharing_Win7_2.jpg
The park bench, and globe help very few people in the world. The top half of that page is pretty much useless and wasted space.
Normal users will want to be able to see a list of wireless networks, and be able to select one to connect to, and be prompted for a password (or username and password) if necessary.
They just need a simple way to share a folder (can already do that with explorer), and access a folder on a remote machine. They already can do that with "Network Neighborhood".
The homegroup stuff? As far as I know, once you have many PCs, the normal users either make do with the simple stuff or find someone who knows some stuff.
As for helping the expert users, I've seen someone using a 3rd party tool to more quickly reconfigure default routes and ip addresses on interfaces quickly. That should not be necessary, stuff like that should be built in.
FWIW I don't like Ubuntu's "Network Manager" either - it doesn't seem to work reliably or predictably (DHCP sometimes doesn't get an IP). I often resort to "ifconfig".
Because the MPAA and RIAA will try to get lots of $$$ from them?
Because Windows 7 is still worse than XP in some areas.
;). e.g. "click on A1 and type 10.1.1.1".
1) I (and my colleague) still haven't got Windows 7 search to work. It regularly doesn't find stuff in _text_ files, even if you click search in file contents, or jump through all the hoops people suggest on Google.
Having to resort to 3rd party tools in Windows 7 is ridiculous, because Windows XP's search works even though it is slow.
2) Windows 7 also has lots of useless clutter on many configuration screens (e.g. network config). Icons that mean nothing to anyone. They don't help the normal users, nor do they help the expert users who now have to click more to do stuff that was easier in Windows XP.
What would help the normal users would be config screens designed for phone support, so that tech support can guide them over the phone more easily
Most normal users don't care about understanding what is going on. They just want stuff to work. So having some icon to tell them stuff is useless. Because if stuff seems to work, they won't notice it, if stuff doesn't work the icon is useless/redundant to them. They're going to call someone and ask for help. It is harder to describe an icon over the phone.
3) The UAC security stuff is just one more way to shove blame to the users. It doesn't help them at all. How are users (expert or not) to know whether to give an application admin access or not? That's harder in practice to solve than the halting problem (no access to source code, no idea of the program's full inputs). After nearly a decade Microsoft could have done better than that.
What I do like about Windows 7 is the grouping of task buttons by application. And the ability to control sound volume on a per app basis (but it's still a bit clumsy).
Microsoft and Apple serve different markets.
The Apple fanatics will gratefully suck up whatever Apple releases or excretes.
Microsoft's users aren't the same - which is why millions are still on Windows XP.
If they weren't hackers and just normal users using it "normally" it's pretty damning.
It's like 5 out of 11 people trying out a TV and having it crash/hang for them. That is terrible. Just imagine what else would be broken (just not crashing).
unity would be crap even if only 1 out of 11 experienced a crash.
1 out of 100 = ready if the boss yells "ship or we die".
1 out of 1000 = you're starting to get to the region where the hardware (other people's bugs) is more likely to crash your stuff.
It seems silly to spend 26% of your income on "guns and ammo" to defend yourself against enemies.
You'd be giving the weapons people far more money than your enemies, and damaging yourself more than your enemies would.
Unless you've a habit of making lots of enemies who hate you a lot. In which case, stop doing that then.