It's not really impossible. There are plenty of jurisdictions in the world where the police do not regularly carry guns. I'm sure you could compare like-for-like between these jurisdictions and ones where guns are common.
I haven't, by the way. I have no idea how that comparison would work out either way.
Not much. It's had new RAM, since it originally came with 256MB (maybe £50 of money, 5 minutes time). It's also had a new DVD writer, since it originally had a plain old CD-ROM (another £50, maybe 20 minutes work?).It's been reformatted twice- probably about 1 hour's work a-piece.
So, £100 and about 2.5 hours work, over 5-6 years? Seems pretty reasonable to me, specially considering it was a thoroughly low-budget PC in the first place.
Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T
on
Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They only won't win if no-one votes for them. That's sort of how elections work.
This machine I'm using at current was originally XP, now dual-booting with Linux but still XP. It is somewhere in the region of 5-6 years old (it has an AMD Duron, which I believe they discontinued in 2004).
Through successive upgrades and careful maintenance, it still runs fine.
Maybe you should learn how to look after your Windows computers a little better?
Indeed. And bandwidth capping also allows people to tailor their package to their needs. If I want more bandwidth, I can pay my ISP a one off fee of £5 or so and I get it. Even more? Pay some more.
It makes no sense that someone who only uses their internet to check their emails and read a blog or two should be paying the same as a regular DVD-torrenter. The former uses only a fraction of the provider's resources compared to the latter, so they should pay a fraction of the price.
And I say this as someone who is regularly tickling my monthly bandwidth cap.
I think it's debatable as to whether someone who has just paid £8 to watch a film should really be forced to take part in parenting other people children.
Yes- Google has enough data that they can actually diagnose any problems you have and mail you the proscription without any user input - for free! As long as you don't mind occasionally hallucinating adverts for local businesses, it's win-win.
Then there's my all-time favorite: Measuring the volume of someone's ass. Really, we did this in High School physics. It's a non-trivial experimental problem. How do you measure the volume of someone's ass, without direct measurements? We used a chalked hard board, some estimates of the elasticity of your butt, and some exprerimental/anectodal estimates of the curvature of your butt when you stood up.
Fill a tub to the brim with a measured volume of water. Have person submerge their arse in the water. Measure the volume of the displaced water.
Easy, AND humiliating. Sounds about right for school!
"Linux" is important because it's a brand. Technically the only similarities between Win7 and XP are a similar kernel, and there are practically no similarities between Mac OS9 and OSX. The only thing that glues them together is the "Windows" and "Mac" brands.
When someone uses a MS PC at work, they just know "it has Windows", and probably don't give it much more thought than that. When they come to buy a home PC, they say "I'll buy a Windows one, like the ones I use at work". The version of Windows they buy need not be the same as the one at work, but MS have still generated a sale.
If they use a "Red Hat" machine at work, they'll be looking for that "Red Hat" PC in the shops, or for free download- which they won't find, not without digging. If they use a "Linux" machine at work, they'll try to buy/download a "Linux" PC for themselves, regardless of the distro.
Besides, then you've got things like "Linux Compatible" hardware. Do you want to list every single compatible distro on the box of a new bit of kit in PC World?
People who fear death the most find as many ways as possible of fighting it.
If someone despises (really down and out despises) the thought of dying, the thought of them disappearing forever, what should you expect except for them to adopt an unfounded belief in benevolent creators, magic, and undying life-after-life?
Those people with a massive death phobia are the ones who are most likely to attach themselves to the concept of an afterlife, and they're also the people you'd expect to resist death as strongly as possible in every other way.
People who are more pragmatic about death are less likely to find find the idea of an afterlife attractive.
The breakthrough we're all waiting for is a decent biofuel crop that can grow where edible crops can't, meaning we can double our agricultural output.
There are a few candidates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_vs_fuel#Non-food_crops_for_biofuel), but at the moment we're still mostly just burning food.
Probably. If it runs Vista 64 it must be running a x86-64 processor of some sort, which Linux has no problem with. Linux also tends to have decent compatibility with the Dell proprietary shit, so all should be well.
They tell you you've got it all right, they just tout it as "3 year free warranty!" or some similar, highly attractive sounding nonsense. It's enough to perhaps sway the non-price-savvy shopper to buy from you instead of someone else (who don't have an awesome free warranty), but then they just build the cost of it into the price anyway.
They sell it to you, but don't tell you that you're making a purchase at all.
Only the sort of "real fans" who care about that sort of thing.
I've been a science fiction fan since god knows when, and I always pronounce it sci-fi. For one, it's easier to say than "ess eff", which seems to make me spit. I usually write it as SF, though.
Maybe it's a national thing too- I've only ever heard American SF fans make a big deal out of it. "Sci-fi" seems much more acceptable over here in the UK.
Is tax evasion somehow different from copyright infringement in a way that doesn't allow for the construction of a similar counter-arguing reduction to absurdity?
Yes, in many ways. For one, tax evasion is a crime against the state (big trouble), while copyright infringement is (for the time being at least) a civil matter, between two private parties.
For two, internet connection and banking secrecy are so far removed from each other for the analogy to be a nonsense. The internet connection you use to infringe copyright is more akin to the phone line you use to call your offshore banker. No-one in their right mind would argue that phones should be banned because they allow you to evade taxes, so no-one would argue that the internet needs stopping to prevent piracy. Although my "full stop" remark might falsely imply it, the argument doesn't scale infinitely in either direction.
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No, we get to back distros who can argue over what the defaults should be.
As is the beauty of the distro system- whatever you want, someone is bound to have already done the leg work.
When you eat a really bad pizza, you can only really bring it up the once...
It's not really impossible. There are plenty of jurisdictions in the world where the police do not regularly carry guns. I'm sure you could compare like-for-like between these jurisdictions and ones where guns are common.
I haven't, by the way. I have no idea how that comparison would work out either way.
Not much. It's had new RAM, since it originally came with 256MB (maybe £50 of money, 5 minutes time). It's also had a new DVD writer, since it originally had a plain old CD-ROM (another £50, maybe 20 minutes work?).It's been reformatted twice- probably about 1 hour's work a-piece.
So, £100 and about 2.5 hours work, over 5-6 years? Seems pretty reasonable to me, specially considering it was a thoroughly low-budget PC in the first place.
They only won't win if no-one votes for them. That's sort of how elections work.
Maybe they've already made the jump to a pervasive machine intelligence...
They've had Conficker-gate too?
This machine I'm using at current was originally XP, now dual-booting with Linux but still XP. It is somewhere in the region of 5-6 years old (it has an AMD Duron, which I believe they discontinued in 2004).
Through successive upgrades and careful maintenance, it still runs fine.
Maybe you should learn how to look after your Windows computers a little better?
Indeed. And bandwidth capping also allows people to tailor their package to their needs. If I want more bandwidth, I can pay my ISP a one off fee of £5 or so and I get it. Even more? Pay some more.
It makes no sense that someone who only uses their internet to check their emails and read a blog or two should be paying the same as a regular DVD-torrenter. The former uses only a fraction of the provider's resources compared to the latter, so they should pay a fraction of the price.
And I say this as someone who is regularly tickling my monthly bandwidth cap.
Surely a patent for patent trolling could never pass the obviousness test?
WHAT ELSE ARE THEY EVEN FOR?!
I think it's debatable as to whether someone who has just paid £8 to watch a film should really be forced to take part in parenting other people children.
"I am the owner of all houses"
"I am the owner of all kinds of houses"
See the difference?
Ah, I see. There are whole new layers of enjoyment to be had from that experiment opening up before me :)
Yes- Google has enough data that they can actually diagnose any problems you have and mail you the proscription without any user input - for free! As long as you don't mind occasionally hallucinating adverts for local businesses, it's win-win.
Then there's my all-time favorite: Measuring the volume of someone's ass. Really, we did this in High School physics. It's a non-trivial experimental problem. How do you measure the volume of someone's ass, without direct measurements? We used a chalked hard board, some estimates of the elasticity of your butt, and some exprerimental/anectodal estimates of the curvature of your butt when you stood up.
Fill a tub to the brim with a measured volume of water. Have person submerge their arse in the water. Measure the volume of the displaced water.
Easy, AND humiliating. Sounds about right for school!
Who's for bringing back the term "microcomputer"?
We can call them MCs!
"Linux" is important because it's a brand. Technically the only similarities between Win7 and XP are a similar kernel, and there are practically no similarities between Mac OS9 and OSX. The only thing that glues them together is the "Windows" and "Mac" brands.
When someone uses a MS PC at work, they just know "it has Windows", and probably don't give it much more thought than that. When they come to buy a home PC, they say "I'll buy a Windows one, like the ones I use at work". The version of Windows they buy need not be the same as the one at work, but MS have still generated a sale.
If they use a "Red Hat" machine at work, they'll be looking for that "Red Hat" PC in the shops, or for free download- which they won't find, not without digging. If they use a "Linux" machine at work, they'll try to buy/download a "Linux" PC for themselves, regardless of the distro.
Besides, then you've got things like "Linux Compatible" hardware. Do you want to list every single compatible distro on the box of a new bit of kit in PC World?
People who fear death the most find as many ways as possible of fighting it.
If someone despises (really down and out despises) the thought of dying, the thought of them disappearing forever, what should you expect except for them to adopt an unfounded belief in benevolent creators, magic, and undying life-after-life?
Those people with a massive death phobia are the ones who are most likely to attach themselves to the concept of an afterlife, and they're also the people you'd expect to resist death as strongly as possible in every other way.
People who are more pragmatic about death are less likely to find find the idea of an afterlife attractive.
The breakthrough we're all waiting for is a decent biofuel crop that can grow where edible crops can't, meaning we can double our agricultural output.
There are a few candidates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_vs_fuel#Non-food_crops_for_biofuel), but at the moment we're still mostly just burning food.
Probably. If it runs Vista 64 it must be running a x86-64 processor of some sort, which Linux has no problem with. Linux also tends to have decent compatibility with the Dell proprietary shit, so all should be well.
Detective work not your strong point then?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=rimmer+lister
They tell you you've got it all right, they just tout it as "3 year free warranty!" or some similar, highly attractive sounding nonsense. It's enough to perhaps sway the non-price-savvy shopper to buy from you instead of someone else (who don't have an awesome free warranty), but then they just build the cost of it into the price anyway.
They sell it to you, but don't tell you that you're making a purchase at all.
Only the sort of "real fans" who care about that sort of thing.
I've been a science fiction fan since god knows when, and I always pronounce it sci-fi. For one, it's easier to say than "ess eff", which seems to make me spit. I usually write it as SF, though.
Maybe it's a national thing too- I've only ever heard American SF fans make a big deal out of it. "Sci-fi" seems much more acceptable over here in the UK.
They don't kill their prey, so they don't limit the population of any other animals.
You may have slightly overshot there. The fact they kill more humans than any other animal does is sort of the problem.
Speaking of which- is that their purpose? Are Mosquitoes there with the express purpose of controlling the human population?
I for one welcome our mosquito overlords...
Is tax evasion somehow different from copyright infringement in a way that doesn't allow for the construction of a similar counter-arguing reduction to absurdity?
Yes, in many ways. For one, tax evasion is a crime against the state (big trouble), while copyright infringement is (for the time being at least) a civil matter, between two private parties.
For two, internet connection and banking secrecy are so far removed from each other for the analogy to be a nonsense. The internet connection you use to infringe copyright is more akin to the phone line you use to call your offshore banker. No-one in their right mind would argue that phones should be banned because they allow you to evade taxes, so no-one would argue that the internet needs stopping to prevent piracy. Although my "full stop" remark might falsely imply it, the argument doesn't scale infinitely in either direction.
I always hope that one day someone will actually implement that. And put a version of it up for download as a screensaver.