My understanding is that S3 units utilize the same technique as DTivos, recording the digital bitstream off the wire direct to disk; replay is basically feeding the hardware decoder, which in the case of the S3 is part of the cable tuner. This would be much simpler and easier to do than decoding even a SD digital channel and re-encoding it, let alone a HD channel.
What confuses me about this, though, is that the units must still have A-D conversion ability to record analog channels, which kind of makes me wonder about what they're really doing for HD recording and if they're transcoding or not.
Cutting off the supply of guns completely is required to cut off the supply of guns to criminals, which pretty much means a total ban on possession of firearms. This solution is socially, politically and logistically unobtainable (not to mention unconstitutional and immoral). Debating it as a solution to the problem of gun crime is like doing financial planning with the lottery.
We could go a long way towards keeping the guns out of criminals hands IF every person caught committing a crime while in possession of a firearm was tried for this crime in whatever court brought the greatest chance of conviction and longest prison sentence (generally Federal). But this SELDOM happens! DAs seldom refer charges to Federal attorneys and the Feds are seldom interested unless its a "major" case (probably for a variety of reasons, including ego/careerism, and Federal prison space limitations), and local DAs seldom bother pressing state charges for the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Instead what happens is the DA gets an "easy" conviction on the low-level felony (drugs, etc) and moves on. The convict does maybe a nickel of hard time for the felony (usually less!), but no time for the gun charge.
If we were as serious about chasing Tommy Chong for selling bongs as we were about jailing people for using a firearm in the commission of a felony, we'd go a long way towards solving our gun-crime problem. Instead we fill our prisons with drug users and drug dealers and then complain there's no space for people with the propensity to commit violence.
I haven't been involved in extra-national assassinations (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn recently...), shouldn't it have been easier to get to him on the street or in his home and then either garrot him with piano wire or shove an icepick into the base of his skull?
It could have been made to look like a robbery or some other type of crime. Poisoning him with some weird, hard-to-get chemical nobody has heard of only makes it look like some weird, KGB plot to begin with, with all the attendent bad publicity (unless of course they wanted it as an initimidation factor.
Of course, all of this is assuming it WAS a KGB plot, and not a plot to make the KGB look bad.
(Yes, I know its not the KGB anymore, at least in name...)
Most states are "employment at will" states -- you can be terminated for pretty much any reason. All this means is you are no longer employed there.
It almost never means you were "terminated for cause" -- this is almost always an enitrely different standard requiring significant documentation showing that the employee had problems with absenteeism, repeatedly broke written rules, committed a crime, etc. Didn't suck up to the boss doesn't count. Employees not fired for cause are generally due unemployment compensation, and the employer generally has the burden to prove termination for cause or the state will pay the unemployment (which the employer almost always has to pay back...)
Further, terminations without cause are generally looked at suspiciously by juries in employment suits. It's one thing for the boss to be a tyrant in the office where few will challenge them. It's quite another when the boss is on the stand forced to explain TO A JURY that he terminated the employee because the employee didn't go along with some unrealistic unwritten policies and not for some legal cause. Juries are usually employees in their regular lives and often side with employees against bosses in borderline cases. This is why businesses often settle -- humiliating management AND losing a lot of money is always more expensive than a years benefit and salary.
A recent New Yorker article on it made it sound like it was attracting significant commercial interest (or at least viability), but partly because some were more or less writing off the hard-core poor who lack the motivation or whatever (they were kind of fuzzy about what criteria it was) to actually make economic use of the loans.
It really is a credit card, just on a smaller scale, although a lot of the programs seem to include a lot of peer reinforcement and some other social work type stuff which seems to help as well.
I think that was a side benefit. The real benefit was the same one Rome got from the building of the Pantheon or any nation has for some great public work.
They provide practical returns (including engineering advances nobody else would have paid for), but they actually serve to inspire mankind with their present accomplishments, future potential and what's possible with collaboration and sacrifice.
Of all the quotes from all the celebrities and public figures in the last 100 years, "One Small Step For Man..." is one of the few thats not tarnished with political opportunism or dated philosophy.
I read an article recently on Microcredit and, while its too early to say if it will be as successful as its proponents claim, the early experience seems to make it seem like its a phenomenal tool for fighting poverty through the initiative of the poor themselves.
That fact that its taken so long for something as successful as Microcredit to come about underscores how little we know about the people we are trying to help -- and how difficult some of the problems are to solve.
I think most Americans would consider most South American countries as having significant urban areas and populations, though we do think you watch to many telenovellas.
Generally speaking, junkies are in it for the "rush" that occurs when first taking it. Injection magnifies the rush the most, which is why hard-core junkies are almost always intervenous users. Freebasing provides a reasonable rush, too, with snorting falling a little further behind.
IIRC, the pain relief of opiates isn't affected much by tolerance, but the rush and the high are, which is what eventually kills many IV-dependent junkies -- they need a larger and larger dose to get the same rush, and eventually end up operating at threshold doses. With a change in potency or even simple dosing mistakes they end up ODing.
Pain relief users who aren't part of the fuzzy category of "addictive personalities" tend to develop a tolerance to the psychoactive effects but are able to keep at stable pain relief doses without spiraling into hard core addiction -- this is why time release opiates are so popular with doctors, since they lessen "rush" effects by keeping consistent blood serum levels. Pain relief users DO get physically dependent on the drugs, but since they generally lack the compulsive, rush-seeking psychological element they're usually tapered off pretty easily (presuming their actual pain source has been fixed; often the challenge is that there is a new or recurring neuropathy that prevents them from being tapered without going back into pain. Good docs try to treat this, bad docs simply consider it "addiction" and don't help the patient.)
What's pathetic is that the DEA gets too involved in medical decisions about pain management. Even if a doctor is over prescribing, I'd prefer to see a person taking clean, dose-regulated narcotics with some kind of medical supervision vs. buying black market narcotics on the street.
Can illiterates (watch, I probably misspelled it!) vote in a constructive way without merely voting for a race, gender or some other highly manipulatable symbol, or simply voting for a party they feel some relationship with (ie, the one that hands out free stuff)?
I'm quite torn, actually. In some ways, requiring a literacy test seems smart -- since people who cannot read or write are definitely not informed in a constructive way and only reinforce all the nasty symbolism and BS in our campaigns, yet denying them the franchise smells suspicously like an oligarchy and opens the door for new, more restrictive ways of ensuring the outcome the elites want.
Anyone live for an extensive period of time in a country that's both democratic and has a substantial number of people who can't read or write and notice anything substantive about the way candidates get out the message vs. how it's done in a supposedly literate country (like the US, with lies an attack ads?).
I figured statutory rape as a generic category of "criminal sexual conduct" resulting from one party being a minor. Calling one category "statutory rape" specifically and one category "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" is arbitrary (although some of the legal consequences may not be).
It's such a telling example of our failure to reconcile our sexuality.
I think in some states its even more complicated -- the age of consent is 16 in Minnesota, unless you are deemed an "authority figure", in which case a relationship between an 18+ person and a 16-18 year old becomes statutory rape. I seem to recall a young male coach (say, under 30) having a long-term relationship with one of his team members. The relationship was exposed when the parents read the daughter's diary -- she had been over 16 at the start of the relationship, but because he was an authority figure and the parents insisted, so he was charged with statutory rape.
I seem to recall the student even submitting a letter to the judge underscoring that the relationship was consensual, initiated by her, and that she was forced to participate against her will in the prosecution.
And I think other states may complicate it further by making sex between, say, two minors of less than 2 years age seperation not statutory rape.
No, it's probably her averageness that's considered part of her appeal. Most men see and find themselves attracted to and in some cases, infatuated with, the ordinary looking women around them. An ordinary girl doing porn simply takes those fantasies closer to full circle.
I think this has something to do with the rise of so-called "amateur" porn as well, and ironically is somewhat feminist since it tends to ignore the cultural standards of beauty so many feminists complain about.
That makes at least two of us that think it's not a gimmick!
I'm blonde and my beard as such is pretty light. But! I also shave my head every week (would otherwise have a full head of hair), and I noticed a big difference from Mach 3 to Fusion.
Which pretty much proves nothing other than Mac fans are cheap, and nobody else was willing to spend money on the grossly underpowered and unstable PPC platforms and OS 8 combos when they could get Win95 an a faster P5 system for half the price.
Nobody ever shipped a G3-based system as the cloning/licensing was killed before those actually competitive hardware platforms could be rolled out.
But now that OS X can run on Intel, the hardware cost difference is mostly eliminated and the OS *is* compelling -- shifting another 10% of the PC userbase to OS X might be a balance-tipping action that would increase the quality and quantity of OS X software.
I hear that statement and dont know whether to laugh or cry. Apple tried it ONCE, and it "didn't work" (based on what criteria of "work"?) and under a very different set of circumstances -- OS 8 and PPC sucked wind compared to Win95/Intel combos of the era.
I think they could make it work with a more compelling OS (OS X) and comperable hardware. And the definition of "work" needs to be better defined, too.
MIPS was well supported by SGI in the 90s (I worked on a 4 CPU SGI workstation in 95), and any other "development" or "optimization" it would have required to port elements of the MacOS/AUX to MIPS would have been trivial compared to development for PowerPC, which Apple ended up doing anyway and not getting a ton of traction for until the G3 series.
Anyway, my point is that the companies had a lot of overlap, and combining them would have meant some technology acceleration for Apple as well as some *computing* credibility that they struggle for (or not, depending on whether the person disagreeing with you agrees that they aren't a computing platform but are a consumer electronics platform).
Obviously the biggest damage was letting Apple get run by soda pop CEOs rather than Jobs or some other computer industry visionary. But perhaps that's what would have prevented a merger with SGI from working in the first place, Jobs' ego and vision versus the engineering required to make a SGI/Apple combination work.
IMO, if they had contiued to expand in the UNIX area and done a better job of marketing AUX, they wouldn't have had to re-develop the idea for OSX
I agree, and my alternate-history storyline has Apple and SGI merging sometime in the early-mid 90s. Apple gains access to "big boy" UNIX and visualization technology, SGI gains a MUCH better user interface than IRIX ever wished it had, end-user "productivity" applications and a hardware market for the under $10k users. The merged company has a UNIX-based operating system with Apple GUI and ease of use and almost unlimited hardware scalability. You buy an application and it runs on your big iron or your desktop system (with more or less simple to use features).
I don't know if MIPS cpus were cheap enough to put in desktops back then, but IIRC at that time MIPS systems were available for NT4, so it probably would have been at least economically viable if not advantageous for Apple to have NOT spent money on the PPC consortium and instead port & merge AUX to the MIPS CPU and SGI's hardware platform.
At this point, we could have skipped the whole OS 9 fiasco and the payware betas that OS X 10.0-10.2 were and had a real, usable Mac/UNIX hybrid before the end of the 90s.
Perhaps it should be stated--once again--that Apple is essentially a hardware company. As many others have pointed out, when they control the hardware AND the software they have much better control over the entire experience.
If this is the case, why are they selling essentially PCs these days? And why are there so many problems with this "we control the variables" experience -- the overheating, the cases cracking, the too-hot power supplies? I own a Macbook and while I like the computer and want to drink the kool-aid, I (and others) can't help but think it will die after a short life.
They're "designed" to be attractive, but they're not designed for any kind of durability or reliability, which makes me think they're just an expensive consumer electronics item with an all-too-obvious planned obsolesence.
Not to mention that a hardware business model is inherently more defendable than a software one since you can't make quick digital copies of hardware.
They could sell OS X for non-Apple hardware with hardware keys to limit copying.
Calling someone a racist is cheap, easy and effective. It works, and most white people are conditioned from years of multiculturalism to accept that anything in opposition to what another racial group wants makes them racist, so it has some kind of weird guilt-induced credibility.
I'd argue that unless the guy getting fedexed reefer is involved in crimes of violence, he's not really a threat compared to someone wanting to blow up stuff. In fact, if we would legalize his trade we'd not only make money off the various taxes (income, sales, drug, etc) but we'd pull the money out of the black market where it might actually (although with weed, not likely) be supporting terrorism or at least a violent criminal enterprise.
But it makes me wonder -- has the WoD gone by the wayside since we changed to the WoT, especially given the mashups that turned various Federal LEOs into Homeland Security?
And speaking of the war on terror and the war on drugs, why don't we just figure out how to buy the entire Afghani opium harvest? Wouldn't that more or less solve a bunch of problems at the same time? IIRC, a warlord in the Golden Triangle once offered us that very opportunity which we turned down -- better to let someone else buy it, and then spend 10x the money and manpower trying to catch them instead, I guess....
Fox and the rest of the Mexican aristocracy wants to get rid of as many poor people as he can before they have a revolution (and/or degrade into Guatemala-style mayhem). The US is his safety valve.
Amnesty is a mistake, it only will encourage more illegal immigrants (the amnesty deadline is always 18 months ahead of time).
IMHO, we need to seal the border to keep illegals out and fine businesses that hire them here in the US $10,000 a day for every day they hire illegals.
Immigration systems will always suck. You can't have purely open immigration -- no sane person advocates that anyone who want to live and work in the US should be able to.
Therefore, there will ALWAYS be limits to immigration and a bureaucracy to manage those limits. I'm sure we could do what we do now more efficiently, but in the end you'll end up about where we are now.
Demand may exceed supply, but you're assuming that it's because demand is great and not that they can't make supplies in a timely fashion (yield or other production problems) or that they have misallocated their production capacity (too many laptop chips, not enough desktop chips).
Either way, failure to meet demand is only good if you're selling luxury goods (unsatisfied demand enhances exclusivity) or you're the weed guy. If you're a mass manufacturer, it hurts.
In some cases not at all -- often the bullet more or less spits about 2 feet because the case bursts releasing the gasses well before the crimp gives up the bullet.
You'd be surprised how much smokeless powder you can use. I reload ammo for handguns, and some of my.44 mag loads require upwards of 20 grains per cartridge. That makes a 5 lb jug good for less than two cases of ammo. Competitive pistol shooters can use a 1000 round case a week without a lot of effort, making 50 lbs of powder about a six month supply.
Shotshells and rifles can use even more, and during the summer guys that shoot skeet or trap with any consistency can burn through a few hundred rounds easily.
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My understanding is that S3 units utilize the same technique as DTivos, recording the digital bitstream off the wire direct to disk; replay is basically feeding the hardware decoder, which in the case of the S3 is part of the cable tuner. This would be much simpler and easier to do than decoding even a SD digital channel and re-encoding it, let alone a HD channel.
What confuses me about this, though, is that the units must still have A-D conversion ability to record analog channels, which kind of makes me wonder about what they're really doing for HD recording and if they're transcoding or not.
Cutting off the supply of guns completely is required to cut off the supply of guns to criminals, which pretty much means a total ban on possession of firearms. This solution is socially, politically and logistically unobtainable (not to mention unconstitutional and immoral). Debating it as a solution to the problem of gun crime is like doing financial planning with the lottery.
We could go a long way towards keeping the guns out of criminals hands IF every person caught committing a crime while in possession of a firearm was tried for this crime in whatever court brought the greatest chance of conviction and longest prison sentence (generally Federal). But this SELDOM happens! DAs seldom refer charges to Federal attorneys and the Feds are seldom interested unless its a "major" case (probably for a variety of reasons, including ego/careerism, and Federal prison space limitations), and local DAs seldom bother pressing state charges for the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Instead what happens is the DA gets an "easy" conviction on the low-level felony (drugs, etc) and moves on. The convict does maybe a nickel of hard time for the felony (usually less!), but no time for the gun charge.
If we were as serious about chasing Tommy Chong for selling bongs as we were about jailing people for using a firearm in the commission of a felony, we'd go a long way towards solving our gun-crime problem. Instead we fill our prisons with drug users and drug dealers and then complain there's no space for people with the propensity to commit violence.
Why wouldn't they just kill him outright?
I haven't been involved in extra-national assassinations (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn recently...), shouldn't it have been easier to get to him on the street or in his home and then either garrot him with piano wire or shove an icepick into the base of his skull?
It could have been made to look like a robbery or some other type of crime. Poisoning him with some weird, hard-to-get chemical nobody has heard of only makes it look like some weird, KGB plot to begin with, with all the attendent bad publicity (unless of course they wanted it as an initimidation factor.
Of course, all of this is assuming it WAS a KGB plot, and not a plot to make the KGB look bad.
(Yes, I know its not the KGB anymore, at least in name...)
Most states are "employment at will" states -- you can be terminated for pretty much any reason. All this means is you are no longer employed there.
It almost never means you were "terminated for cause" -- this is almost always an enitrely different standard requiring significant documentation showing that the employee had problems with absenteeism, repeatedly broke written rules, committed a crime, etc. Didn't suck up to the boss doesn't count. Employees not fired for cause are generally due unemployment compensation, and the employer generally has the burden to prove termination for cause or the state will pay the unemployment (which the employer almost always has to pay back...)
Further, terminations without cause are generally looked at suspiciously by juries in employment suits. It's one thing for the boss to be a tyrant in the office where few will challenge them. It's quite another when the boss is on the stand forced to explain TO A JURY that he terminated the employee because the employee didn't go along with some unrealistic unwritten policies and not for some legal cause. Juries are usually employees in their regular lives and often side with employees against bosses in borderline cases. This is why businesses often settle -- humiliating management AND losing a lot of money is always more expensive than a years benefit and salary.
A recent New Yorker article on it made it sound like it was attracting significant commercial interest (or at least viability), but partly because some were more or less writing off the hard-core poor who lack the motivation or whatever (they were kind of fuzzy about what criteria it was) to actually make economic use of the loans.
It really is a credit card, just on a smaller scale, although a lot of the programs seem to include a lot of peer reinforcement and some other social work type stuff which seems to help as well.
I think that was a side benefit. The real benefit was the same one Rome got from the building of the Pantheon or any nation has for some great public work.
They provide practical returns (including engineering advances nobody else would have paid for), but they actually serve to inspire mankind with their present accomplishments, future potential and what's possible with collaboration and sacrifice.
Of all the quotes from all the celebrities and public figures in the last 100 years, "One Small Step For Man..." is one of the few thats not tarnished with political opportunism or dated philosophy.
I read an article recently on Microcredit and, while its too early to say if it will be as successful as its proponents claim, the early experience seems to make it seem like its a phenomenal tool for fighting poverty through the initiative of the poor themselves.
That fact that its taken so long for something as successful as Microcredit to come about underscores how little we know about the people we are trying to help -- and how difficult some of the problems are to solve.
I think most Americans would consider most South American countries as having significant urban areas and populations, though we do think you watch to many telenovellas.
Generally speaking, junkies are in it for the "rush" that occurs when first taking it. Injection magnifies the rush the most, which is why hard-core junkies are almost always intervenous users. Freebasing provides a reasonable rush, too, with snorting falling a little further behind.
IIRC, the pain relief of opiates isn't affected much by tolerance, but the rush and the high are, which is what eventually kills many IV-dependent junkies -- they need a larger and larger dose to get the same rush, and eventually end up operating at threshold doses. With a change in potency or even simple dosing mistakes they end up ODing.
Pain relief users who aren't part of the fuzzy category of "addictive personalities" tend to develop a tolerance to the psychoactive effects but are able to keep at stable pain relief doses without spiraling into hard core addiction -- this is why time release opiates are so popular with doctors, since they lessen "rush" effects by keeping consistent blood serum levels. Pain relief users DO get physically dependent on the drugs, but since they generally lack the compulsive, rush-seeking psychological element they're usually tapered off pretty easily (presuming their actual pain source has been fixed; often the challenge is that there is a new or recurring neuropathy that prevents them from being tapered without going back into pain. Good docs try to treat this, bad docs simply consider it "addiction" and don't help the patient.)
What's pathetic is that the DEA gets too involved in medical decisions about pain management. Even if a doctor is over prescribing, I'd prefer to see a person taking clean, dose-regulated narcotics with some kind of medical supervision vs. buying black market narcotics on the street.
Can illiterates (watch, I probably misspelled it!) vote in a constructive way without merely voting for a race, gender or some other highly manipulatable symbol, or simply voting for a party they feel some relationship with (ie, the one that hands out free stuff)?
I'm quite torn, actually. In some ways, requiring a literacy test seems smart -- since people who cannot read or write are definitely not informed in a constructive way and only reinforce all the nasty symbolism and BS in our campaigns, yet denying them the franchise smells suspicously like an oligarchy and opens the door for new, more restrictive ways of ensuring the outcome the elites want.
Anyone live for an extensive period of time in a country that's both democratic and has a substantial number of people who can't read or write and notice anything substantive about the way candidates get out the message vs. how it's done in a supposedly literate country (like the US, with lies an attack ads?).
I figured statutory rape as a generic category of "criminal sexual conduct" resulting from one party being a minor. Calling one category "statutory rape" specifically and one category "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" is arbitrary (although some of the legal consequences may not be).
It's such a telling example of our failure to reconcile our sexuality.
I think in some states its even more complicated -- the age of consent is 16 in Minnesota, unless you are deemed an "authority figure", in which case a relationship between an 18+ person and a 16-18 year old becomes statutory rape. I seem to recall a young male coach (say, under 30) having a long-term relationship with one of his team members. The relationship was exposed when the parents read the daughter's diary -- she had been over 16 at the start of the relationship, but because he was an authority figure and the parents insisted, so he was charged with statutory rape.
I seem to recall the student even submitting a letter to the judge underscoring that the relationship was consensual, initiated by her, and that she was forced to participate against her will in the prosecution.
And I think other states may complicate it further by making sex between, say, two minors of less than 2 years age seperation not statutory rape.
No, it's probably her averageness that's considered part of her appeal. Most men see and find themselves attracted to and in some cases, infatuated with, the ordinary looking women around them. An ordinary girl doing porn simply takes those fantasies closer to full circle.
I think this has something to do with the rise of so-called "amateur" porn as well, and ironically is somewhat feminist since it tends to ignore the cultural standards of beauty so many feminists complain about.
That makes at least two of us that think it's not a gimmick!
I'm blonde and my beard as such is pretty light. But! I also shave my head every week (would otherwise have a full head of hair), and I noticed a big difference from Mach 3 to Fusion.
Which pretty much proves nothing other than Mac fans are cheap, and nobody else was willing to spend money on the grossly underpowered and unstable PPC platforms and OS 8 combos when they could get Win95 an a faster P5 system for half the price.
Nobody ever shipped a G3-based system as the cloning/licensing was killed before those actually competitive hardware platforms could be rolled out.
But now that OS X can run on Intel, the hardware cost difference is mostly eliminated and the OS *is* compelling -- shifting another 10% of the PC userbase to OS X might be a balance-tipping action that would increase the quality and quantity of OS X software.
> Apple tried that
I hear that statement and dont know whether to laugh or cry. Apple tried it ONCE, and it "didn't work" (based on what criteria of "work"?) and under a very different set of circumstances -- OS 8 and PPC sucked wind compared to Win95/Intel combos of the era.
I think they could make it work with a more compelling OS (OS X) and comperable hardware. And the definition of "work" needs to be better defined, too.
MIPS was well supported by SGI in the 90s (I worked on a 4 CPU SGI workstation in 95), and any other "development" or "optimization" it would have required to port elements of the MacOS/AUX to MIPS would have been trivial compared to development for PowerPC, which Apple ended up doing anyway and not getting a ton of traction for until the G3 series.
Anyway, my point is that the companies had a lot of overlap, and combining them would have meant some technology acceleration for Apple as well as some *computing* credibility that they struggle for (or not, depending on whether the person disagreeing with you agrees that they aren't a computing platform but are a consumer electronics platform).
Obviously the biggest damage was letting Apple get run by soda pop CEOs rather than Jobs or some other computer industry visionary. But perhaps that's what would have prevented a merger with SGI from working in the first place, Jobs' ego and vision versus the engineering required to make a SGI/Apple combination work.
IMO, if they had contiued to expand in the UNIX area and done a better job of marketing AUX, they wouldn't have had to re-develop the idea for OSX
I agree, and my alternate-history storyline has Apple and SGI merging sometime in the early-mid 90s. Apple gains access to "big boy" UNIX and visualization technology, SGI gains a MUCH better user interface than IRIX ever wished it had, end-user "productivity" applications and a hardware market for the under $10k users. The merged company has a UNIX-based operating system with Apple GUI and ease of use and almost unlimited hardware scalability. You buy an application and it runs on your big iron or your desktop system (with more or less simple to use features).
I don't know if MIPS cpus were cheap enough to put in desktops back then, but IIRC at that time MIPS systems were available for NT4, so it probably would have been at least economically viable if not advantageous for Apple to have NOT spent money on the PPC consortium and instead port & merge AUX to the MIPS CPU and SGI's hardware platform.
At this point, we could have skipped the whole OS 9 fiasco and the payware betas that OS X 10.0-10.2 were and had a real, usable Mac/UNIX hybrid before the end of the 90s.
Perhaps it should be stated--once again--that Apple is essentially a hardware company. As many others have pointed out, when they control the hardware AND the software they have much better control over the entire experience.
If this is the case, why are they selling essentially PCs these days? And why are there so many problems with this "we control the variables" experience -- the overheating, the cases cracking, the too-hot power supplies? I own a Macbook and while I like the computer and want to drink the kool-aid, I (and others) can't help but think it will die after a short life.
They're "designed" to be attractive, but they're not designed for any kind of durability or reliability, which makes me think they're just an expensive consumer electronics item with an all-too-obvious planned obsolesence.
Not to mention that a hardware business model is inherently more defendable than a software one since you can't make quick digital copies of hardware.
They could sell OS X for non-Apple hardware with hardware keys to limit copying.
Calling someone a racist is cheap, easy and effective. It works, and most white people are conditioned from years of multiculturalism to accept that anything in opposition to what another racial group wants makes them racist, so it has some kind of weird guilt-induced credibility.
I'd argue that unless the guy getting fedexed reefer is involved in crimes of violence, he's not really a threat compared to someone wanting to blow up stuff. In fact, if we would legalize his trade we'd not only make money off the various taxes (income, sales, drug, etc) but we'd pull the money out of the black market where it might actually (although with weed, not likely) be supporting terrorism or at least a violent criminal enterprise.
But it makes me wonder -- has the WoD gone by the wayside since we changed to the WoT, especially given the mashups that turned various Federal LEOs into Homeland Security?
And speaking of the war on terror and the war on drugs, why don't we just figure out how to buy the entire Afghani opium harvest? Wouldn't that more or less solve a bunch of problems at the same time? IIRC, a warlord in the Golden Triangle once offered us that very opportunity which we turned down -- better to let someone else buy it, and then spend 10x the money and manpower trying to catch them instead, I guess....
Fox and the rest of the Mexican aristocracy wants to get rid of as many poor people as he can before they have a revolution (and/or degrade into Guatemala-style mayhem). The US is his safety valve.
Amnesty is a mistake, it only will encourage more illegal immigrants (the amnesty deadline is always 18 months ahead of time).
IMHO, we need to seal the border to keep illegals out and fine businesses that hire them here in the US $10,000 a day for every day they hire illegals.
Immigration systems will always suck. You can't have purely open immigration -- no sane person advocates that anyone who want to live and work in the US should be able to.
Therefore, there will ALWAYS be limits to immigration and a bureaucracy to manage those limits. I'm sure we could do what we do now more efficiently, but in the end you'll end up about where we are now.
Demand may exceed supply, but you're assuming that it's because demand is great and not that they can't make supplies in a timely fashion (yield or other production problems) or that they have misallocated their production capacity (too many laptop chips, not enough desktop chips).
Either way, failure to meet demand is only good if you're selling luxury goods (unsatisfied demand enhances exclusivity) or you're the weed guy. If you're a mass manufacturer, it hurts.
In some cases not at all -- often the bullet more or less spits about 2 feet because the case bursts releasing the gasses well before the crimp gives up the bullet.
You'd be surprised how much smokeless powder you can use. I reload ammo for handguns, and some of my .44 mag loads require upwards of 20 grains per cartridge. That makes a 5 lb jug good for less than two cases of ammo. Competitive pistol shooters can use a 1000 round case a week without a lot of effort, making 50 lbs of powder about a six month supply.
Shotshells and rifles can use even more, and during the summer guys that shoot skeet or trap with any consistency can burn through a few hundred rounds easily.
50 lbs isn't really all that much.