They could have satisfied me by doing some kind of less-intensive unbranded analysis, like how long the technology for the platter and the read head had been deployed, what the price point was compared to the release price of similar drives, etc.
It would be very useful to know that buying a drive as soon as its price has fallen to 70% of similar drives' cost when the technology was first introduced, is most likely to result in a good / bad drive. I, personally, would think this should be highly correlated. Catch them when the manufacturing process is mature and the workers are skilled with it, but before they start slashing margins to reach "the consumer".
I could also handle some research on the internals, but I think that the usefulness of such data would quickly expire. That is, unless the reviewer is going to get a torque wrench, a laser leveler, and some vibration sensors to try and figure out exacly how tight the screw fittings are, how flatly the motor is mounted, and what kind of movement the read head induces in the casing when it jumps around.
Okay, now -- I understand your point, but don't judge others. I have AS as well, but I feel that it is an important part of my self, my life, and my current happiness. I've even gone so far as to remark to my wife that if our kids won't have Asperger's Syndrome, I'd just as soon not have any.
My childhood was miserable. I was depressed, and often suicidal, from a very young age. However, in spite of my environment, I grew out of it. I firmly believe that I could be a better and happier person if I had had someone who understood and genuinely cared about me, and the prospect of offering such a life to my children is genuinely exciting.
I'm not trying to understate or undervalue your situation. It's just that you don't know if any such child would have a hellish existence, one that transcends the neurotypical's very ability to experience life, or something in between. And the very fact that they would have you to guide them through it could make all the difference. IANAP(sychologist); However, it sounds like you see the developmental difference that defines you as the source of abuse and unhappiness, instead of the individuals who acted with varying degrees of ignorance, intolerance, and malice.
Right... because you're taking advantage of the fact that you're much, much *closer* to the center of mass for the artificial diamond, and therefore the gravity at a distance equal to some fraction of the Earth's radius would be exponentially higher. I get it.
So, if the diamond was.01% of the earth's mass, you would suspend it just a bit higher than 1% of the earth's radius above the surface. Since the gravitational constant and your weight would be identical, removing them and setting gravity equal in both directions yields: 0.0001 / (0.01 ^ 2) == 1 / 1, which is true.
But wouldn't this be potentially catastrophic, moving the center of gravity for the orbiting mass from the planet's center to some point on, above, or at least close to its surface?
While I find myself with mod points today, curiously there isn't an option in the select-list for "I peed myself a little in fright"... It's a shame, really.
If you want to get deeper into the issue, the common theory is that marriage is society's way of encouraging childbirth and stable, complete childrearing. The state subsidizes it as an outgrowth of the ethical position that people having and raising children is desirable.
It's the state's place to serve its citizens. But the citizens should get some benefit. Perhaps tax breaks should have nothing to do with marital status, and should be based entirely on parenting healthy children, and the burden of raising them. Your 'two of one, three of the other' would each end up with a fifth of a deduction. And a homosexual couple who raises a child would get the tax break that childless heterosexual couples get now.
You assume this isn't deliberate, or at least a desirable side effect. Tell me, how have this administration's interests been aligned with Science?
Now, people fear and distrust not only homebrew electronics, but those who make and use them. Because invariably, it looks like a bomb or a biochemical dispersion device they saw on 24 or some terror-plot movie. Pretty soon, anything that's not an iPod or a cellphone will be confined to approved research labs -- not because of the government, but because the researchers will fear for their safety and livelihood if they're seen with an unfinished work of science.
The path being taken is so fascist, it's ridiculous. Public opinion is being molded so that anybody who thinks for themselves, makes new or creative products on their own, or performs real science, can be seen as an enemy of the state. I wouldn't be surprised if software is the next step in the smear campaign. The intellectuals are being kicked out of this society. Science and logic and rationality and skepticism have no place in your social or personal life - so keep them locked up in the government-approved lab where they belong. And if you're not working for a government-approved lab, well then, obviously the checks and balances aren't in place and you can't be trusted with science.
As far as *I* can see, all the right we have, we have solely because other people choose to respect those rights.
Think like the founding fathers:
Start with Locke: We own our selves. Therefore, we own our physical bodies and our thoughts. We must further own the results of our actions and thoughts. When we take unowned resources from the environment and mingle them with our thoughts and actions, we have ownership of the products produced.
All reasonable applications of morality, ethics, and law issue from this and can be explained in the general case as such: Do not infringe on another person's property. If you do, you will have to make restitution to them. The nature of society is based on the principle that violence is the solution of last recourse.
However, this sort of logic for morality (some would say, strictly legality) went out of fashion some several hundred years ago, and only recently is enjoying a resurgence.
You know, who ever declared that Alberto Gonzales has the right to live? Anyone?
You know, that right actually is stated in the positive in the Declaration of Independence, although I'm not sure if that counts (emphasis mine):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Honestly the law and reasoning seems legitimate. Although why Apple wants $5 instead of $2, I don't know. (other than greed)
Remember the story a few years back when some University installed a VOIP system for their dorm rooms, and then after the fact they found out it would cost them more to track, bill, and support it than they could reasonably charge the residents? They decided to offer unlimited domestic long distance for free... Apple, however, is (at least as far as they can figure out) obligated to charge something for the service and show a profit so as not to fall afoul of the regulations. I'd imagine $5.00 is pretty much a minimum for collecting a credit card payment online, paying support costs related to the update, and having a bit left over to write down as profit.
Doesn't work on my iMac G5 running 10.4.8 with Quicktime 7.1.3.
Maybe it only affects PC users with Quicktime, or maybe you have to have Quicktime Pro installed?
Don't give them the publicity. Certainly Apple's software team should read the site, but they don't deserve any more attention than that; Their whole site is dedicated to insulting Apple and taking pot-shots. They write like capricious seven-year-olds. I, for one, am going to ignore them for the rest of the month -- and probably for the rest of their lives. Not because of the factual content, but more for their immature, deliberately destructive, and insulting behavior.
And yet, if a locksmith writes a book that details how a certain brand of lock is not secure, including reproducible instructions given in order to prove he is correct, and then someone uses that book to break into your house, that locksmith will IN NO WAY be liable for your loss.
If he did it with malice aforethought and took pains, like this anonymous jerk, to ensure that the manufacturer is caught with their collective pants down, then yes. This sensationalist "security researcher" is a sadist, sitting back and instilling fear, intentionally enslaving the vendor to work on their product in sequence of his priorities, in some kind of sick race to see if the vendor can fix the problem before the customer, caught in the middle, gets ripped off.
If you publish exploits in any medium for any device, and do not notify the relevant vendor ahead of time, notwithstanding past coercive and/or retributive behavior on the part of the vendor in question, then you are doing the same thing as this guy. By announcing this ahead of time, he calls criminal attention to his site, and is acting with malice toward the vendor and its customers. In essence, he's inviting everybody to gather at the starting line so that they can race to get to the innocent people's property first. The vendors, racing to defend it, and the criminals racing to exploit and expropriate it. All so he can be notable as the officiator of the race.
A book would come out differently. But even then, you should tell the vendor before it hits the shelves.
No way. If he discovered ways to bypass a security system, and knowingly gave thieves access to my property, he would be -- ethically for sure, and most likely legally -- a willful accomplice to trespass and any associated crime. Whether he's granting access to my land, my safe, a bank vault, or my computer, it's trespassing and it's a crime he participates in.
I couldn't care less what his beef is with Apple; the fact that he's distributing this information to people who would use it to commit crimes, before notifying the property owners who are their prospective victims, is abhorrent. It is nothing less than enabling and encouraging criminal acts, with malice aforethought. In our above analogy, even if the lock maker or security system vendor had ignored him in the past, that does not and cannot give him the right to aid and abet criminal acts against that company's customers.
He is many things, but not irresponsible.
Perhaps he is not irresponsible. I guess "criminal" and "despicable" would be better labels after all.
Before you mod me OT, keep in mind that I'm responding to a post that is modded well
You won't be modded down for being offtopic, as much as being illogical. Offtopic is just the closest pre-defined moniker the mods can hit you with.
The parent's point wasn't that the US was the only state engaged in subversive activities and censorship, but rather that they are pioneers in the field, or at least an outstanding modern example. Showing a recent copycat move by another state just reinforces the GP's point. You would have been amazingly on-topic, if you said "Look how well the US censors. Other totalitarian governments worldwide are starting to emulate them."
It's also worth noting that if we waited to use or rely on or extrapolate from the current theory, we would probably never get anywhere as a species. It is useful to rely on the best known theory. Simply because it is better than any other, it follows that it should produce the most beneficial effects, or at least the most predictable effects, when applied.
Physics is especially susceptible to this; If people withheld judgement on Newton's theories, we would have missed out on a lot of things. If people had been skeptical -- not constructive skepticism as science implies, but functional skepticism -- of Quantum theory, innumerable advances in our standard of living would never have come about. It is the very application of the current-best theory that allows the increases in the standard of living that make it possible to devote more time and energy to the theory, thereby displacing or revising it. If we didn't use the current (incomplete) state of knowledge as authoritative, we'd all still be subsistence farmers with no leisure in which to develop our knowledge.
What store can you walk into that does not sell iTunes Gift Cards? The study itself laments the fact that the "larger" block purchases have all but disappeared from Apple's transaction logs, accounting for the supposed drop. I mean, you'd have to be in a pretty strange state of mind to believe that Sony's revenues could be analysed by looking at their credit card processing transaction logs...
With iTunes gift cards on sale at Wal-Mart, Target, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA,.... and everywhere, down to the level of gas stations and convenience stores, are we actually denying the possibility that Apple's sales originate in some other fashion? Especially after the recent articles about paranoid shoppers going out of their way to avoid putting their credit card numbers online? Without actual revenue numbers, which Apple is not required to report, the article is meaningless.
For there is only one damned truth out there: your own. And there is only one person who needs to hear about it: you.
Following your line of logic, a person who is color-blind should be able to drive. It doesn't matter if the light is red, because only their perception of it matters -- nobody should blame them for a loss of life that results from their continued operation of a motor vehicle, and far be it from anyone to infringe upon the driver's right to believe that the light is green, or his right to rely exclusively on that belief in his daily life.
Or, in another vein, with your tribal example: If it wasn't a hawk that "brings the rain", but perhaps a tiger, who often maimed livestock and/or citizens as he passes through the village preceding the rain, what then? Is it reasonable and right for the villagers to allow the animal to continue attacking them out of fear that retaliation against the tiger would cost them the benefits of the rain? False conclusions are of dubious and fleeting value; Perhaps some of our conclusions are false, and they will fail us in the future. But this is an argument for, not against, skepticism, diligence, and study.
It's your brand of anti-logic that is causing the problem the article discusses. You should be ashamed, and frankly it worries me that others are afraid to heap richly-deserved scorn upon ideas like this.
I am not going to delve into anti-intellectual issue right now, but I would ask: What is the ratio of good scientists to evil scientists in movies?
Anyone recall Spiderman 2, one of the most popular and well-received movies of the past several years? Even when you have a good scientist trying to do world-changing energy research, the only way to save our civilization is by destroying him, his lab, and his research. Scientists must be inherently evil, or at least physicists who do energy research. I guess we should just resign ourselves to fossil fuels and be glad that such dangerous heresy isn't happening in our neck of the woods. ^_^
How is it any different than having to pay capital gains tax on the part of your nominal gains counteracted by inflation? You haven't gained anything! Take the extreme example -- You have certificates of deposit for gold (the metal), and you have to pay capital gains tax when the dollar loses value, even though the gold's purchasing power is virtually guaranteed to be constant in the long run!
I'm not entirely sure that logical ratiocination and taxation have ever been formally introduced. If they were, they probably decided pretty quickly that they didn't belong in the same room together.
People should be thinking "is this an interesting and valid thought?" rather than "do I agree with what this person is saying?" - unfortunately this doesn't happen.
Ah, the value judgement rears its head again. I'm not sure how you can easily distinguish between invalid thoughts and thoughts you disagree with. For me, and I would hope for many people who get mod points, the points are expended on those comments that add something useful to the discussion.
A tired old argument that, for me, was debunked years ago -- however 'Interesting' or 'Insightful' it may have been the first few times I heard it -- simply isn't saying anything. Knowing why an argument or point is flawed, invalid, or deliberately vicious, am I obligated to spend my mod points on it just because its falsehood might be interesting or even insightful to an uninformed reader? Do I not, on the contrary, have a duty to remove information which I know to be false or misleading by downmodding?
Moderation isn't about feeding your own opinions back to you; It's about obtaining an aggregate value judgement from the community as a whole. If you want to browse sans value judgements, or if you disagree with the community's concensus and want wrong, invalid, or uninformed (per the moderation system, as judged by the community) opinions to be given equal or greater weight than those moderated up, use the 'Prefs' panel. That's what it's for.
But I want to bring up the point that what you're saying about build quality is part of a downward spiral when combined with the software for embedded devices. I'm a major gadget freak, and have had about 25 different cellphones over the past eight years. To be fair, I'm including about 10 phones that I purchased because they looked perfect for my needs, and returned within my alotted time period because either the build quality (Moto RAZR) or the software (Sony-Ericsson, Sanyo, I'm looking at you!) was horrible.
My Newton MessagePad 120 was upgradeable, and I think that my ROM replacement to get Newton OS 2.0 in 1996 was the LAST successful software upgrade that was available to me for a fee. I paid $125.00, and spent about 10 days without it. The software added an innumerable amount of features, stability, new hardware compatibility, and speed enhancements, and the device still runs adequately to this day. I don't use it regularly, but it's sometimes fun to take it out and play with the software I wrote at that time, and it works well. The durable hardware was extended with software, and added a good decade to its useful life. If my primary PDA broke down, I would consider using it full-time again.
Since then, I have not really encountered manufacturers who are willing to replace software on an existing device. Even if the software is available online for free, most users cannot or will not do this for themselves, which reduces a manufacturer's willingness to provide updates. If a new firmware is available for your handset, audio player, or PDA, would people be willing to pay $20.00 for a professional upgrade from the manufacturer or place of purchase, or would they just buy a new one for $200.00?
To the manufacturer, this is a two-pronged question: (1) Can I make the user buy new hardware because the existing hardware is obselete or broken?, and (2) Can I make the user buy new hardware because the existing software is awful, and the new software is only available on newer hardware?
I think if people are willing to fund the development of new software for existing devices (this includes open-source firmware, although I think the average user will never go that route), then the initial price of the equipment itself is less of an issue. But lower prices for hardware serve to dilute the utility of improving the software that runs on it, and how do you convince a user that the hardware will survive for a sufficient period after the upgrade to make upgrading worthwhile? If I had an option of spending another $50 on software for an 18-month old device, but had no guarantee that it would last another 18 months, or that I could even replace the *battery*, why wouldn't I buy a new hardware + software combo and start anew?
Basically, manufacturers have painted themselves into a corner -- They've forced themselves into a situation where there is no rationale to paying for updated software, so they must either offer it for free (that is, develop and support it out of past profits), or not allow it to be used with older hardware.
That's great. But my mobile phone's RSS reader doesn't parse out those tags, and this story really had me believing for a minute... Not all of us are nerds enough to prefer reading the feed as a raw XML stream.
But, doesn't this strategy make it practical for those very same reasons? A single prototype, or even ten of them, would constitute a small portion of the entire shield. If they work, great! Improve them, send the next batch. I would also make the assumption that it should be trivial to design a system that allows them to find their orbit point on their own, considering only their alignment between the Earth and Sun, and the net gravity along that axis. Just throw them out from the space station or an orbiting shuttle, and let them find their own way. If they fail, learn from the mistake.
Additionally, they wouldn't need very much fuel -- they would only need propulsion to go toward the sun. All other locomotion could be achieved by using white flaps that reflect the incoming solar energy in a particular direction. For that matter, we could aim EM at their backsides to push them away from Earth. It doesn't sound all that expensive.
If you think I believe anything of that sort about human nature, macroeconomics, or politics, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
How about let's take a break from this discussion -- we'll each take a nap and have that dream where the remaining 99.86% of the population caught some inexplicable virus, and it's only the rational, thinking beings who don't beleive the disinformation and miseducation that remain to rebuild the world as a capitalist utopia.
That's all well and good, but unless you can get pirated PS3 games, you've just spent far more than Sony's loss, and stuck yourself with an overhyped piece of junk with no actual utility.
Slashdot Mirror
They could have satisfied me by doing some kind of less-intensive unbranded analysis, like how long the technology for the platter and the read head had been deployed, what the price point was compared to the release price of similar drives, etc.
It would be very useful to know that buying a drive as soon as its price has fallen to 70% of similar drives' cost when the technology was first introduced, is most likely to result in a good / bad drive. I, personally, would think this should be highly correlated. Catch them when the manufacturing process is mature and the workers are skilled with it, but before they start slashing margins to reach "the consumer".
I could also handle some research on the internals, but I think that the usefulness of such data would quickly expire. That is, unless the reviewer is going to get a torque wrench, a laser leveler, and some vibration sensors to try and figure out exacly how tight the screw fittings are, how flatly the motor is mounted, and what kind of movement the read head induces in the casing when it jumps around.
Okay, now -- I understand your point, but don't judge others. I have AS as well, but I feel that it is an important part of my self, my life, and my current happiness. I've even gone so far as to remark to my wife that if our kids won't have Asperger's Syndrome, I'd just as soon not have any.
My childhood was miserable. I was depressed, and often suicidal, from a very young age. However, in spite of my environment, I grew out of it. I firmly believe that I could be a better and happier person if I had had someone who understood and genuinely cared about me, and the prospect of offering such a life to my children is genuinely exciting.
I'm not trying to understate or undervalue your situation. It's just that you don't know if any such child would have a hellish existence, one that transcends the neurotypical's very ability to experience life, or something in between. And the very fact that they would have you to guide them through it could make all the difference. IANAP(sychologist); However, it sounds like you see the developmental difference that defines you as the source of abuse and unhappiness, instead of the individuals who acted with varying degrees of ignorance, intolerance, and malice.
Right... because you're taking advantage of the fact that you're much, much *closer* to the center of mass for the artificial diamond, and therefore the gravity at a distance equal to some fraction of the Earth's radius would be exponentially higher. I get it.
So, if the diamond was .01% of the earth's mass, you would suspend it just a bit higher than 1% of the earth's radius above the surface. Since the gravitational constant and your weight would be identical, removing them and setting gravity equal in both directions yields: 0.0001 / (0.01 ^ 2) == 1 / 1, which is true.
Thanks ^_^
But wouldn't this be potentially catastrophic, moving the center of gravity for the orbiting mass from the planet's center to some point on, above, or at least close to its surface?
While I find myself with mod points today, curiously there isn't an option in the select-list for "I peed myself a little in fright"... It's a shame, really.
If you want to get deeper into the issue, the common theory is that marriage is society's way of encouraging childbirth and stable, complete childrearing. The state subsidizes it as an outgrowth of the ethical position that people having and raising children is desirable.
It's the state's place to serve its citizens. But the citizens should get some benefit. Perhaps tax breaks should have nothing to do with marital status, and should be based entirely on parenting healthy children, and the burden of raising them. Your 'two of one, three of the other' would each end up with a fifth of a deduction. And a homosexual couple who raises a child would get the tax break that childless heterosexual couples get now.
You assume this isn't deliberate, or at least a desirable side effect. Tell me, how have this administration's interests been aligned with Science?
Now, people fear and distrust not only homebrew electronics, but those who make and use them. Because invariably, it looks like a bomb or a biochemical dispersion device they saw on 24 or some terror-plot movie. Pretty soon, anything that's not an iPod or a cellphone will be confined to approved research labs -- not because of the government, but because the researchers will fear for their safety and livelihood if they're seen with an unfinished work of science.
The path being taken is so fascist, it's ridiculous. Public opinion is being molded so that anybody who thinks for themselves, makes new or creative products on their own, or performs real science, can be seen as an enemy of the state. I wouldn't be surprised if software is the next step in the smear campaign. The intellectuals are being kicked out of this society. Science and logic and rationality and skepticism have no place in your social or personal life - so keep them locked up in the government-approved lab where they belong. And if you're not working for a government-approved lab, well then, obviously the checks and balances aren't in place and you can't be trusted with science.
Think like the founding fathers:
Start with Locke: We own our selves. Therefore, we own our physical bodies and our thoughts. We must further own the results of our actions and thoughts. When we take unowned resources from the environment and mingle them with our thoughts and actions, we have ownership of the products produced.
All reasonable applications of morality, ethics, and law issue from this and can be explained in the general case as such: Do not infringe on another person's property. If you do, you will have to make restitution to them. The nature of society is based on the principle that violence is the solution of last recourse.
However, this sort of logic for morality (some would say, strictly legality) went out of fashion some several hundred years ago, and only recently is enjoying a resurgence.
You know, that right actually is stated in the positive in the Declaration of Independence, although I'm not sure if that counts (emphasis mine):
Remember the story a few years back when some University installed a VOIP system for their dorm rooms, and then after the fact they found out it would cost them more to track, bill, and support it than they could reasonably charge the residents? They decided to offer unlimited domestic long distance for free... Apple, however, is (at least as far as they can figure out) obligated to charge something for the service and show a profit so as not to fall afoul of the regulations. I'd imagine $5.00 is pretty much a minimum for collecting a credit card payment online, paying support costs related to the update, and having a bit left over to write down as profit.
Doesn't work on my iMac G5 running 10.4.8 with Quicktime 7.1.3.
Maybe it only affects PC users with Quicktime, or maybe you have to have Quicktime Pro installed?
Don't give them the publicity. Certainly Apple's software team should read the site, but they don't deserve any more attention than that; Their whole site is dedicated to insulting Apple and taking pot-shots. They write like capricious seven-year-olds. I, for one, am going to ignore them for the rest of the month -- and probably for the rest of their lives. Not because of the factual content, but more for their immature, deliberately destructive, and insulting behavior.
If he did it with malice aforethought and took pains, like this anonymous jerk, to ensure that the manufacturer is caught with their collective pants down, then yes. This sensationalist "security researcher" is a sadist, sitting back and instilling fear, intentionally enslaving the vendor to work on their product in sequence of his priorities, in some kind of sick race to see if the vendor can fix the problem before the customer, caught in the middle, gets ripped off.
If you publish exploits in any medium for any device, and do not notify the relevant vendor ahead of time, notwithstanding past coercive and/or retributive behavior on the part of the vendor in question, then you are doing the same thing as this guy. By announcing this ahead of time, he calls criminal attention to his site, and is acting with malice toward the vendor and its customers. In essence, he's inviting everybody to gather at the starting line so that they can race to get to the innocent people's property first. The vendors, racing to defend it, and the criminals racing to exploit and expropriate it. All so he can be notable as the officiator of the race.
A book would come out differently. But even then, you should tell the vendor before it hits the shelves.
No way. If he discovered ways to bypass a security system, and knowingly gave thieves access to my property, he would be -- ethically for sure, and most likely legally -- a willful accomplice to trespass and any associated crime. Whether he's granting access to my land, my safe, a bank vault, or my computer, it's trespassing and it's a crime he participates in.
I couldn't care less what his beef is with Apple; the fact that he's distributing this information to people who would use it to commit crimes, before notifying the property owners who are their prospective victims, is abhorrent. It is nothing less than enabling and encouraging criminal acts, with malice aforethought. In our above analogy, even if the lock maker or security system vendor had ignored him in the past, that does not and cannot give him the right to aid and abet criminal acts against that company's customers.
Perhaps he is not irresponsible. I guess "criminal" and "despicable" would be better labels after all.
You won't be modded down for being offtopic, as much as being illogical. Offtopic is just the closest pre-defined moniker the mods can hit you with.
The parent's point wasn't that the US was the only state engaged in subversive activities and censorship, but rather that they are pioneers in the field, or at least an outstanding modern example. Showing a recent copycat move by another state just reinforces the GP's point. You would have been amazingly on-topic, if you said "Look how well the US censors. Other totalitarian governments worldwide are starting to emulate them."
It's also worth noting that if we waited to use or rely on or extrapolate from the current theory, we would probably never get anywhere as a species. It is useful to rely on the best known theory. Simply because it is better than any other, it follows that it should produce the most beneficial effects, or at least the most predictable effects, when applied.
Physics is especially susceptible to this; If people withheld judgement on Newton's theories, we would have missed out on a lot of things. If people had been skeptical -- not constructive skepticism as science implies, but functional skepticism -- of Quantum theory, innumerable advances in our standard of living would never have come about. It is the very application of the current-best theory that allows the increases in the standard of living that make it possible to devote more time and energy to the theory, thereby displacing or revising it. If we didn't use the current (incomplete) state of knowledge as authoritative, we'd all still be subsistence farmers with no leisure in which to develop our knowledge.
To me, it's a very elegant system.
What store can you walk into that does not sell iTunes Gift Cards? The study itself laments the fact that the "larger" block purchases have all but disappeared from Apple's transaction logs, accounting for the supposed drop. I mean, you'd have to be in a pretty strange state of mind to believe that Sony's revenues could be analysed by looking at their credit card processing transaction logs...
With iTunes gift cards on sale at Wal-Mart, Target, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, .... and everywhere, down to the level of gas stations and convenience stores, are we actually denying the possibility that Apple's sales originate in some other fashion? Especially after the recent articles about paranoid shoppers going out of their way to avoid putting their credit card numbers online? Without actual revenue numbers, which Apple is not required to report, the article is meaningless.
Following your line of logic, a person who is color-blind should be able to drive. It doesn't matter if the light is red, because only their perception of it matters -- nobody should blame them for a loss of life that results from their continued operation of a motor vehicle, and far be it from anyone to infringe upon the driver's right to believe that the light is green, or his right to rely exclusively on that belief in his daily life.
Or, in another vein, with your tribal example: If it wasn't a hawk that "brings the rain", but perhaps a tiger, who often maimed livestock and/or citizens as he passes through the village preceding the rain, what then? Is it reasonable and right for the villagers to allow the animal to continue attacking them out of fear that retaliation against the tiger would cost them the benefits of the rain? False conclusions are of dubious and fleeting value; Perhaps some of our conclusions are false, and they will fail us in the future. But this is an argument for, not against, skepticism, diligence, and study.
It's your brand of anti-logic that is causing the problem the article discusses. You should be ashamed, and frankly it worries me that others are afraid to heap richly-deserved scorn upon ideas like this.
Anyone recall Spiderman 2, one of the most popular and well-received movies of the past several years? Even when you have a good scientist trying to do world-changing energy research, the only way to save our civilization is by destroying him, his lab, and his research. Scientists must be inherently evil, or at least physicists who do energy research. I guess we should just resign ourselves to fossil fuels and be glad that such dangerous heresy isn't happening in our neck of the woods. ^_^
How is it any different than having to pay capital gains tax on the part of your nominal gains counteracted by inflation? You haven't gained anything! Take the extreme example -- You have certificates of deposit for gold (the metal), and you have to pay capital gains tax when the dollar loses value, even though the gold's purchasing power is virtually guaranteed to be constant in the long run!
I'm not entirely sure that logical ratiocination and taxation have ever been formally introduced. If they were, they probably decided pretty quickly that they didn't belong in the same room together.
Ah, the value judgement rears its head again. I'm not sure how you can easily distinguish between invalid thoughts and thoughts you disagree with. For me, and I would hope for many people who get mod points, the points are expended on those comments that add something useful to the discussion.
A tired old argument that, for me, was debunked years ago -- however 'Interesting' or 'Insightful' it may have been the first few times I heard it -- simply isn't saying anything. Knowing why an argument or point is flawed, invalid, or deliberately vicious, am I obligated to spend my mod points on it just because its falsehood might be interesting or even insightful to an uninformed reader? Do I not, on the contrary, have a duty to remove information which I know to be false or misleading by downmodding?
Moderation isn't about feeding your own opinions back to you; It's about obtaining an aggregate value judgement from the community as a whole. If you want to browse sans value judgements, or if you disagree with the community's concensus and want wrong, invalid, or uninformed (per the moderation system, as judged by the community) opinions to be given equal or greater weight than those moderated up, use the 'Prefs' panel. That's what it's for.
Amen. I wish I had mod points today.
But I want to bring up the point that what you're saying about build quality is part of a downward spiral when combined with the software for embedded devices. I'm a major gadget freak, and have had about 25 different cellphones over the past eight years. To be fair, I'm including about 10 phones that I purchased because they looked perfect for my needs, and returned within my alotted time period because either the build quality (Moto RAZR) or the software (Sony-Ericsson, Sanyo, I'm looking at you!) was horrible.
My Newton MessagePad 120 was upgradeable, and I think that my ROM replacement to get Newton OS 2.0 in 1996 was the LAST successful software upgrade that was available to me for a fee. I paid $125.00, and spent about 10 days without it. The software added an innumerable amount of features, stability, new hardware compatibility, and speed enhancements, and the device still runs adequately to this day. I don't use it regularly, but it's sometimes fun to take it out and play with the software I wrote at that time, and it works well. The durable hardware was extended with software, and added a good decade to its useful life. If my primary PDA broke down, I would consider using it full-time again.
Since then, I have not really encountered manufacturers who are willing to replace software on an existing device. Even if the software is available online for free, most users cannot or will not do this for themselves, which reduces a manufacturer's willingness to provide updates. If a new firmware is available for your handset, audio player, or PDA, would people be willing to pay $20.00 for a professional upgrade from the manufacturer or place of purchase, or would they just buy a new one for $200.00?
To the manufacturer, this is a two-pronged question: (1) Can I make the user buy new hardware because the existing hardware is obselete or broken?, and (2) Can I make the user buy new hardware because the existing software is awful, and the new software is only available on newer hardware?
I think if people are willing to fund the development of new software for existing devices (this includes open-source firmware, although I think the average user will never go that route), then the initial price of the equipment itself is less of an issue. But lower prices for hardware serve to dilute the utility of improving the software that runs on it, and how do you convince a user that the hardware will survive for a sufficient period after the upgrade to make upgrading worthwhile? If I had an option of spending another $50 on software for an 18-month old device, but had no guarantee that it would last another 18 months, or that I could even replace the *battery*, why wouldn't I buy a new hardware + software combo and start anew?
Basically, manufacturers have painted themselves into a corner -- They've forced themselves into a situation where there is no rationale to paying for updated software, so they must either offer it for free (that is, develop and support it out of past profits), or not allow it to be used with older hardware.
That's great. But my mobile phone's RSS reader doesn't parse out those tags, and this story really had me believing for a minute... Not all of us are nerds enough to prefer reading the feed as a raw XML stream.
But, doesn't this strategy make it practical for those very same reasons? A single prototype, or even ten of them, would constitute a small portion of the entire shield. If they work, great! Improve them, send the next batch. I would also make the assumption that it should be trivial to design a system that allows them to find their orbit point on their own, considering only their alignment between the Earth and Sun, and the net gravity along that axis. Just throw them out from the space station or an orbiting shuttle, and let them find their own way. If they fail, learn from the mistake. Additionally, they wouldn't need very much fuel -- they would only need propulsion to go toward the sun. All other locomotion could be achieved by using white flaps that reflect the incoming solar energy in a particular direction. For that matter, we could aim EM at their backsides to push them away from Earth. It doesn't sound all that expensive.
If you think I believe anything of that sort about human nature, macroeconomics, or politics, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
How about let's take a break from this discussion -- we'll each take a nap and have that dream where the remaining 99.86% of the population caught some inexplicable virus, and it's only the rational, thinking beings who don't beleive the disinformation and miseducation that remain to rebuild the world as a capitalist utopia.
That's all well and good, but unless you can get pirated PS3 games, you've just spent far more than Sony's loss, and stuck yourself with an overhyped piece of junk with no actual utility.