Re:Doublespeak
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I couldn't agree more about your statements on rebuilding. If we don't do a half-assed job of occupation and rebuilding, Iraq could become an very potent force for stability and peace in the region. Look at Post WWII Japan for example, we helped rebuild the country and they almost buried us economically in the 1970's and early 80's, and while Japan's struggling some economically, overall compared to most of the Arab world they've got an insanely great economy.
Before the buyout they used to sell a version that was boxed with RedHat. Pretty much any OS that you can install can be installed, it supports booting the virtual machine from a CD. Of course, some features may not work, like another poster pointed out about FreeBSD (Sound works, X doesn't).
Re:So does it like *work* this time around?
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
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· Score: 1
Hmm...I'm running VPC6 on my 667Mhz PB. Works like a champ. The only thing I need it for is Query Analyzer, and it works great for that.
Of course, I didn't have a problem with VPC5 either. I'm thinking you may have acquired some bad media?
Am I saying it's unethical or unwise to release software under the GPL? Nope, but I'm saying contributors need to consider how they feel about their software being used for both good and bad purposes, and perhaps weigh in their minds whether that software is going to do more harm than good.
Ethics are the responsibility of the indivdual contributor (Ethics are always an individual responsibility), and the GPL gives you the capability to make very powerful unrevokable decisions that should be carefully considered beforehand.
You can't release a product under the GPL, which is a free software license, and then restrict the freedom to use the software. That's kind of my whole point. Free is free. Not free is not free. Restricting the license in any way means you aren't using the GPL.
Because at that point, where do you draw the line? Government agencies are bad? What about NGO's that push a specific agenda? What about places like the Palestinian Authority, that aren't quite a government? How about the Red Cross, the Red Crescent? You going to keep up a list of who can and can't, and for what? And then take the heat for doing it in a way that's politically motivated?
not so much, I think. It's either free software, or it's not free software. Middle grounds are very slippery.
OK, here's your ethical dilemma. Linux is Free Software (GNU/Linux is Free Software....heh). That means you can't put restrictions on use into the software license. That means that if the TIA wants to use Linux...they can. And we can either all stop working on it or we can assume that we're working for a greater good than TIA is evil.
An interesting aside to the free software movement, no? Think about it, if you license something under GPL, you can't say who can or can't use it, just what baggage they have to handle in order to resell or distribute it (provide source if they modify it and resell it). Free means free, so that means terrorists, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, no matter which side of any particular war you choose, if you develop free software one implication is that people that you don't like can pick it up and use it to do things you don't like.
That means that the government can use it also. To watch you. And that they've got the source to make sure there aren't any backdoors.
A little bit of new perspective. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, just an unexplored thing.
So, I start working on this new project. It's of "great strategic importance" to our corporate overlords. "Key to the success" of several "initiatives".
Of course, there's no budget for it this year. So you'll just have to figure out how to do it without any hardware to run it on.
Sent my resume out the same day. Already had 3 interviews.
I'd imagine that you'd also get another feature from this service: Long term music replacement. How about not having to back up all the songs you bought because you can just re-download your library when you get a new machine, or if you have a hard drive crash? Just sign in and suck it all back down again. Yeah, they'll probably have some kind of fraud protection on that (only X signups per Y time period, or call customer support, whatever). Not too painful if you're actually being honest (I rebuild my mac like once a year). At least I'd hope they would have something like this. It's kind of like the Baen Books ebooks model: you buy it, you can read it online or download it, and if you lose it, you can just download it again after signing into the site.
Hmm...be interesting if they implemented a few other features, like playlist sharing...This has some potential I think. Maybe a referral system (if your friends buy this song you get credit towards another song later).
Bzzt. Wrong. THe people paying 95% of the taxes do NOT make 95% of the income. It actually turns out that the upper 25% of the income distribution pays 95% of the taxes. OK, you want numbers, here's an article to read: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021803/content/the_limbaugh_institute_2.guest.html
Yeah, it's rush limbaugh. Who cares. He's (OK, his staff is) quoting the IRS fact book, and it's valid research if you can get past your immediate ad-hominem rejection. It's also the first thing I found on a google search.
And, yeah, guess what, the liberals in this country regard everyone over the 50% median income to be rich. And therefore to not be paying enough taxes. Al Gore's biggest tax incentive during the campaign was to give tax breaks to PEOPLE WHO DON'T PAY TAXES. Screw that.
(Note: I think Safari may have a bug that chopped up my last post. Sorry for the double).
Hmm...but rich people tend to spend more, so they pay more tax. It's the exact same percentage of what they pay on goods/services if you're rich or poor. That's why tax theorists favor it, its FAIR. In your example, the rich person is more likely to buy a more expensive computer and pay more taxes, or buy more computers, and pay more taxes, or by a computer and a big screen TV, and pay more taxes, or buy more-expensive-crappier food and pay more taxes. As opposed to now, when the rich person just pays more income taxes (95% of the money raised from income taxes comes from people considered "rich") and gets no additional use for their money.
What's the solution? You spend a lot of time whining about the "regressive" taxes, but you don't pose any alternatives.
I've always been in favor of a head tax. The guy who sits next to me with 12 kids would pay a lot more taxes than me instead of a lot less (I'm not exaggerating, he really has 12 kids. He talks to them all day on the phone. It's as annoying as you'd think.) But that kind of tax is "Anti-Family" (then again, so am I), so it'll never happen. It would, however, nicely reduce the noisy brat in the restaurant problem. Friggin breeders. (yes, this paragraph is mostly a joke. Except for the screaming brats and friggin breeders part.)
So, you want a flat tax? That's disproportionately
Hmm...but rich people tend to spend more, so they pay more tax. It's the exact same percentage of what they pay on goods/services if you're rich or poor. That's why tax theorists favor it, its FAIR. In your example, the rich person is more likely to buy a more expensive computer and pay more taxes, or buy more computers, and pay more taxes, or by a computer and a big screen TV, and pay more taxes, or buy more-expensive-crappier food and pay more taxes. As opposed to now, when the rich person just pays more income taxes (95% of the money raised from income taxes comes from people considered "rich") and gets no additional use for their money.
What's the solution? You spend a lot of time whining about the "regressive" taxes, but you don't pose any alternatives.
I've always been in favor of a head tax. The guy who sits next to me with 12 kids would pay a lot more taxes than me instead of a lot less (I'm not exaggerating, he really has 12 kids. He talks to them all day on the phone. It's as annoying as you'd think.) But that kind of tax is "Anti-Family" (then again, so am I), so it'll never happen. It would, however, nicely reduce the noisy brat in the restaurant problem. Friggin breeders. (yes, this paragraph is mostly a joke. Except for the screaming brats and friggin breeders part.)
So, you want a flat tax? That's disproportionately
While that might be prior art....How about patenting a business process in which a company could make money by patenting things that shouldn't have been patented because of prior art and suing or threatening to sue people who are in use of the prior art?
I signed it under duress, essentially "sign it or we'll fire you". It was all part of my company's new "War on Employees" after we got bought out by a big healthcare insurance provider. I sent a very nasty email to my boss, his boss, and our HR Director who was driving the whole thing. The email essentially said I was signing it only because they'd threatened to fire me if I didn't, which may throw some interesting twists into the fray if they decide to pursue it, I'm not sure that threatening someone with termination if they don't sign a contract invalidates the contract. You, however, are probably in a different position, because it's a condition of a new job, not an existing one. IANAL, YMMV.
The ironic thing is that a week before that I'd turned down a job offer at a different company because I liked the environment here. If that requirement had been issued a week before, I'd be working for someone else now. And now I'm looking for a new job because of the other changes that have been made lately. Such is life. Anybody looking for a really experienced DBA? I intend to tell them exactly where they can put that piece of paper after I leave.
My coworkers here were pretty ticked about it, but not enough people complained.
The really ironic thing is that part of the justification for getting us to sign it was to make sure we weren't terrorists. No kidding. Thank you John Ashcroft.
(going MORE offtopic here) Oh, and thanks to all those stupid Missouri liberals who voted for the dead guy (Mel Carnahan) in the election that would have put Ashcroft back into the Senate instead of in the Attorney General's seat. Great move there bozos. Now we've got a freshman senator and a crappy attorney general.
I'd agree except that Gwen Stefani and Sting both had the volume go down as they got away from their microphones. Gwen was messing with the crowd some, and her voice faded. Sting was moving around some, his voice faded. Shania, however, was always loud and clear, even when she was holding the microphone at her waist.
So, either Shania had an extremely good twitch-reflex sound guy, or she wasn't singing. Gwen and Sting, though, sounded like they were singing the whole time.
I'm just wondering why the Canadian got to sing God Bless America.
Yes, but if I recall correctly, the dolphin safe tuna had two other things going for it. First, it was like a dime more than regular tuna, not double the price, just a dime. Second, they had that whole "government mandated" thing hanging over the heads of the tuna producers, which is a pretty big incentive to quit screwing around and do the right thing for the wrong reasons (because they said so, not because it's good for the environment).
So, they basically figured out a way to make tuna dolphin safe without hugely impacting the cost (yeah, it's maybe 10% more, canned tuna is cheap) while still making money. I think if environmentally friendlier electronics cost 10% more, lots of folks would be all over it. I can see the tear-jerking TV ad now,
The organic food/less toxic chip analogy doesn't hold up very well. Here's why:
I usually buy organic foods not solely because of the lack of "nasty chemical icky-poo" but because, well, they usually taste better. Organically grown vegetables tend to taste better than non-organically grown ones for a variety of reasons. Organically grown meats and eggs taste way better than factory-farm grown meats and eggs. Don't even start on dairy products like cheese and milk, it's like cheese for the first time, it tastes so much different. So, one could say that these foods perform better for the end user.
However, an organically built memory chip would (hopefully) perform to exactly the same specs as a toxically built one. So they don't perform any better, so people will be less likely to pay more for them.
I really do miss the local stuff. Let's see...moron morning DJ's doing prank calls, commercials for local exterminators, commercials for local car dealers, commercials for local plumbers. Then the afternoon drive home, featuring the EXACT SAME SONGS played the previous day's drive home. Then there's our AM radio lineup. The only thing more boring than AM radio is baseball, and now that football season's about over we get to look forward to either baseball games or old geezers talking about baseball. Oh, and I also miss the talk show hosts that fall into either the poor Rush Limbaugh imitator category or poor Dr Laura imitator category. Gee...yeah, I really do miss that local content.
OK, the only thing I miss is the weather. Traffic reports here are a joke anyway. Of course, I've got the ham radio (2M FM for storm spotting mostly) in my vehicle so I can just turn on 162.550 Mhz and listen to our local robot reading the weather forecast.
At any rate, local content here sucks. Bigtime. I had totally given up on any local station except for NPR, and the extreme liberal bias of the commentators was annoying the heck out of me. And guess what, the NPR station here just had the national content, delivered via satellite. So, yeah, even the local station I listened to just rebroadcast satellite programming.
I think the thing that gives XM it's edge is that they have 100 channels. You get 20 Mhz of bandwidth (a little less, actually) so you can fit in, what, a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half or so stations? So you get the variety of content. you get both a bluegrass and a folk station. You get a college and an alternative rock station (2 actually). Hip hop, rap, electronic. Whatever you want, they've got it somewhere.
Author's don't directly lose money through shoplifting. However, let's say you run a nice modern bookstore, and you note that you have one copy of my book in stock, so you don't reorder it. Unfortunately, some miscreant has stolen that copy, and since you've got 15,000 books in your store, you won't even notice until you do a full inventory, which will be next July.
So, you don't reorder (costs me the author money in lost sales) AND nobody's able to buy the book and tell their friends how great it is (costs me future sales).
The biggest threat to any artist is not copyright theft. Not by a longshot.
The biggest threat to any artist is obscurity.
If someone said they'd get your music played on the radio, but they wouldn't pay you anything for it (you get to keep your copyright though) I'm betting you'd jump at the chance because it would get your name out there and defeat obscurity for a little while.
I would expect that shoplifting physical media from stores costs artists more money than IP theft, because it simultaneously deprives you of royalties for the copies stolen AND it prevents other people from buying your work. If my local bookstore thinks it has two copies of a book on the shelf, they won't reorder it. If both copies were stolen, then not only is the author out for those two copies, but also loses because nobody else will see the books.
I'm basically rehashing a lot of Eric Flint's ideas, which can be read in an essay at his publisher's website, here.
Yes, but the honda weighs a lot less. Keep in mind, this thing's the size of a Cadillac DeVille, not a shoebox Honda. Serious room for 5 full sized passengers. And it's a constant torque curve, so it'll accelerate like crazy (which is really the reason I want the 4WD). Internal combustion engines generate torque (and HP) as their RPM's increase. Fuel cells use electric motors, which have the same torque at 10 RPM as they do at 10,000 RPM.
To turn your argument around, I've got a 1 HP engine in a radio controlled car, and it'll do 60. Some others will do 85 with not much more power. So Honda's not living up to that standard! How dare they produce inefficient cars that take 90 HP to get to 120 MPH.
Yeah, I really don't like the interface in the prototype. Fortunately, it's skinnable also. So you can have a car with pedals. Part of the review says that it'll be a better car without pedals because the steering wheel will have a better range of motion. However, if you are handicapped and missing legs or something this would provide a great deal of independence I'd think.
I was pretty impressed with the performance specs. 97+ MPH out of 130ish horespower is not bad. When they can pull 200 HP out of it and have 4 wheel drive (more for safe delivery of power than offroad, think Audi Quattro not Land Rover) and you'll have something I'll want to buy. Oh, and 250-300 mile range would be good also.
Begs the question of "how do you measure fuel economy". MPG (or L/100Km) is a bit off, unless you measure the capacity at STP. I think we need to go to a straightforward percentage (how many joules were liberated and how much forward momentum/sec was generated).
The concurrent argument goes like this. Find a gun control advocate. Have them put up a large, well lit sign in their front yard that says "I'm a gun control advocate. I don't have any guns!". Count the amount of time that elapses between when the sign goes up and the house gets robbed.
(the other fun part of this would be to find a gun nut and have them put up the same sign. I think you might find that crime rates go down as the number of dead criminals increases)
I don't have to own a gun as long as I have the ability to purchase one the bad guys out there will never know if I do or not.
Mozilla doesn't tend to work as well for browsing becase...wait for it...many web pages are specifically written for the rendering bugs in IE.
Yup, it's true. IE doesn't just have security bugs, it's also got rendering problems. Of course, so does everyone else. I can go to a dozen different pages on our intranet and find where they've coded specifically around IE bugs to the extent of making the page unusable on any of the 3 browsers I've got loaded, one of which includes IE for the Mac.
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I couldn't agree more about your statements on rebuilding. If we don't do a half-assed job of occupation and rebuilding, Iraq could become an very potent force for stability and peace in the region. Look at Post WWII Japan for example, we helped rebuild the country and they almost buried us economically in the 1970's and early 80's, and while Japan's struggling some economically, overall compared to most of the Arab world they've got an insanely great economy.
Before the buyout they used to sell a version that was boxed with RedHat. Pretty much any OS that you can install can be installed, it supports booting the virtual machine from a CD. Of course, some features may not work, like another poster pointed out about FreeBSD (Sound works, X doesn't).
Hmm...I'm running VPC6 on my 667Mhz PB. Works like a champ. The only thing I need it for is Query Analyzer, and it works great for that.
Of course, I didn't have a problem with VPC5 either. I'm thinking you may have acquired some bad media?
Am I saying it's unethical or unwise to release software under the GPL? Nope, but I'm saying contributors need to consider how they feel about their software being used for both good and bad purposes, and perhaps weigh in their minds whether that software is going to do more harm than good.
Ethics are the responsibility of the indivdual contributor (Ethics are always an individual responsibility), and the GPL gives you the capability to make very powerful unrevokable decisions that should be carefully considered beforehand.
You can't release a product under the GPL, which is a free software license, and then restrict the freedom to use the software. That's kind of my whole point. Free is free. Not free is not free. Restricting the license in any way means you aren't using the GPL.
Because at that point, where do you draw the line? Government agencies are bad? What about NGO's that push a specific agenda? What about places like the Palestinian Authority, that aren't quite a government? How about the Red Cross, the Red Crescent? You going to keep up a list of who can and can't, and for what? And then take the heat for doing it in a way that's politically motivated?
not so much, I think. It's either free software, or it's not free software. Middle grounds are very slippery.
OK, here's your ethical dilemma. Linux is Free Software (GNU/Linux is Free Software....heh). That means you can't put restrictions on use into the software license. That means that if the TIA wants to use Linux...they can. And we can either all stop working on it or we can assume that we're working for a greater good than TIA is evil.
An interesting aside to the free software movement, no? Think about it, if you license something under GPL, you can't say who can or can't use it, just what baggage they have to handle in order to resell or distribute it (provide source if they modify it and resell it). Free means free, so that means terrorists, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, no matter which side of any particular war you choose, if you develop free software one implication is that people that you don't like can pick it up and use it to do things you don't like.
That means that the government can use it also. To watch you. And that they've got the source to make sure there aren't any backdoors.
A little bit of new perspective. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, just an unexplored thing.
So, I start working on this new project. It's of "great strategic importance" to our corporate overlords. "Key to the success" of several "initiatives".
Of course, there's no budget for it this year. So you'll just have to figure out how to do it without any hardware to run it on.
Sent my resume out the same day. Already had 3 interviews.
I'd imagine that you'd also get another feature from this service: Long term music replacement. How about not having to back up all the songs you bought because you can just re-download your library when you get a new machine, or if you have a hard drive crash? Just sign in and suck it all back down again. Yeah, they'll probably have some kind of fraud protection on that (only X signups per Y time period, or call customer support, whatever). Not too painful if you're actually being honest (I rebuild my mac like once a year). At least I'd hope they would have something like this. It's kind of like the Baen Books ebooks model: you buy it, you can read it online or download it, and if you lose it, you can just download it again after signing into the site.
Hmm...be interesting if they implemented a few other features, like playlist sharing...This has some potential I think. Maybe a referral system (if your friends buy this song you get credit towards another song later).
Bzzt. Wrong. THe people paying 95% of the taxes do NOT make 95% of the income. It actually turns out that the upper 25% of the income distribution pays 95% of the taxes. OK, you want numbers, here's an article to read: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021803 /content/the_limbaugh_institute_2.guest.html
Yeah, it's rush limbaugh. Who cares. He's (OK, his staff is) quoting the IRS fact book, and it's valid research if you can get past your immediate ad-hominem rejection. It's also the first thing I found on a google search.
And, yeah, guess what, the liberals in this country regard everyone over the 50% median income to be rich. And therefore to not be paying enough taxes. Al Gore's biggest tax incentive during the campaign was to give tax breaks to PEOPLE WHO DON'T PAY TAXES. Screw that.
(Note: I think Safari may have a bug that chopped up my last post. Sorry for the double).
Hmm...but rich people tend to spend more, so they pay more tax. It's the exact same percentage of what they pay on goods/services if you're rich or poor. That's why tax theorists favor it, its FAIR. In your example, the rich person is more likely to buy a more expensive computer and pay more taxes, or buy more computers, and pay more taxes, or by a computer and a big screen TV, and pay more taxes, or buy more-expensive-crappier food and pay more taxes. As opposed to now, when the rich person just pays more income taxes (95% of the money raised from income taxes comes from people considered "rich") and gets no additional use for their money.
What's the solution? You spend a lot of time whining about the "regressive" taxes, but you don't pose any alternatives.
I've always been in favor of a head tax. The guy who sits next to me with 12 kids would pay a lot more taxes than me instead of a lot less (I'm not exaggerating, he really has 12 kids. He talks to them all day on the phone. It's as annoying as you'd think.) But that kind of tax is "Anti-Family" (then again, so am I), so it'll never happen. It would, however, nicely reduce the noisy brat in the restaurant problem. Friggin breeders. (yes, this paragraph is mostly a joke. Except for the screaming brats and friggin breeders part.)
So, you want a flat tax? That's disproportionately
Hmm...but rich people tend to spend more, so they pay more tax. It's the exact same percentage of what they pay on goods/services if you're rich or poor. That's why tax theorists favor it, its FAIR. In your example, the rich person is more likely to buy a more expensive computer and pay more taxes, or buy more computers, and pay more taxes, or by a computer and a big screen TV, and pay more taxes, or buy more-expensive-crappier food and pay more taxes. As opposed to now, when the rich person just pays more income taxes (95% of the money raised from income taxes comes from people considered "rich") and gets no additional use for their money.
What's the solution? You spend a lot of time whining about the "regressive" taxes, but you don't pose any alternatives.
I've always been in favor of a head tax. The guy who sits next to me with 12 kids would pay a lot more taxes than me instead of a lot less (I'm not exaggerating, he really has 12 kids. He talks to them all day on the phone. It's as annoying as you'd think.) But that kind of tax is "Anti-Family" (then again, so am I), so it'll never happen. It would, however, nicely reduce the noisy brat in the restaurant problem. Friggin breeders. (yes, this paragraph is mostly a joke. Except for the screaming brats and friggin breeders part.)
So, you want a flat tax? That's disproportionately
While that might be prior art....How about patenting a business process in which a company could make money by patenting things that shouldn't have been patented because of prior art and suing or threatening to sue people who are in use of the prior art?
Try and get venture capital for that one.
I signed it under duress, essentially "sign it or we'll fire you". It was all part of my company's new "War on Employees" after we got bought out by a big healthcare insurance provider. I sent a very nasty email to my boss, his boss, and our HR Director who was driving the whole thing. The email essentially said I was signing it only because they'd threatened to fire me if I didn't, which may throw some interesting twists into the fray if they decide to pursue it, I'm not sure that threatening someone with termination if they don't sign a contract invalidates the contract. You, however, are probably in a different position, because it's a condition of a new job, not an existing one. IANAL, YMMV.
The ironic thing is that a week before that I'd turned down a job offer at a different company because I liked the environment here. If that requirement had been issued a week before, I'd be working for someone else now. And now I'm looking for a new job because of the other changes that have been made lately. Such is life. Anybody looking for a really experienced DBA? I intend to tell them exactly where they can put that piece of paper after I leave.
My coworkers here were pretty ticked about it, but not enough people complained.
The really ironic thing is that part of the justification for getting us to sign it was to make sure we weren't terrorists. No kidding. Thank you John Ashcroft.
(going MORE offtopic here)
Oh, and thanks to all those stupid Missouri liberals who voted for the dead guy (Mel Carnahan) in the election that would have put Ashcroft back into the Senate instead of in the Attorney General's seat. Great move there bozos. Now we've got a freshman senator and a crappy attorney general.
I'd agree except that Gwen Stefani and Sting both had the volume go down as they got away from their microphones. Gwen was messing with the crowd some, and her voice faded. Sting was moving around some, his voice faded. Shania, however, was always loud and clear, even when she was holding the microphone at her waist.
So, either Shania had an extremely good twitch-reflex sound guy, or she wasn't singing. Gwen and Sting, though, sounded like they were singing the whole time.
I'm just wondering why the Canadian got to sing God Bless America.
Yes, but if I recall correctly, the dolphin safe tuna had two other things going for it. First, it was like a dime more than regular tuna, not double the price, just a dime. Second, they had that whole "government mandated" thing hanging over the heads of the tuna producers, which is a pretty big incentive to quit screwing around and do the right thing for the wrong reasons (because they said so, not because it's good for the environment).
So, they basically figured out a way to make tuna dolphin safe without hugely impacting the cost (yeah, it's maybe 10% more, canned tuna is cheap) while still making money. I think if environmentally friendlier electronics cost 10% more, lots of folks would be all over it. I can see the tear-jerking TV ad now,
The organic food/less toxic chip analogy doesn't hold up very well. Here's why:
I usually buy organic foods not solely because of the lack of "nasty chemical icky-poo" but because, well, they usually taste better. Organically grown vegetables tend to taste better than non-organically grown ones for a variety of reasons. Organically grown meats and eggs taste way better than factory-farm grown meats and eggs. Don't even start on dairy products like cheese and milk, it's like cheese for the first time, it tastes so much different. So, one could say that these foods perform better for the end user.
However, an organically built memory chip would (hopefully) perform to exactly the same specs as a toxically built one. So they don't perform any better, so people will be less likely to pay more for them.
Just a thought.
I have XM.
I really do miss the local stuff. Let's see...moron morning DJ's doing prank calls, commercials for local exterminators, commercials for local car dealers, commercials for local plumbers. Then the afternoon drive home, featuring the EXACT SAME SONGS played the previous day's drive home. Then there's our AM radio lineup. The only thing more boring than AM radio is baseball, and now that football season's about over we get to look forward to either baseball games or old geezers talking about baseball. Oh, and I also miss the talk show hosts that fall into either the poor Rush Limbaugh imitator category or poor Dr Laura imitator category. Gee...yeah, I really do miss that local content.
OK, the only thing I miss is the weather. Traffic reports here are a joke anyway. Of course, I've got the ham radio (2M FM for storm spotting mostly) in my vehicle so I can just turn on 162.550 Mhz and listen to our local robot reading the weather forecast.
At any rate, local content here sucks. Bigtime. I had totally given up on any local station except for NPR, and the extreme liberal bias of the commentators was annoying the heck out of me. And guess what, the NPR station here just had the national content, delivered via satellite. So, yeah, even the local station I listened to just rebroadcast satellite programming.
I think the thing that gives XM it's edge is that they have 100 channels. You get 20 Mhz of bandwidth (a little less, actually) so you can fit in, what, a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half or so stations? So you get the variety of content. you get both a bluegrass and a folk station. You get a college and an alternative rock station (2 actually). Hip hop, rap, electronic. Whatever you want, they've got it somewhere.
Author's don't directly lose money through shoplifting. However, let's say you run a nice modern bookstore, and you note that you have one copy of my book in stock, so you don't reorder it. Unfortunately, some miscreant has stolen that copy, and since you've got 15,000 books in your store, you won't even notice until you do a full inventory, which will be next July.
So, you don't reorder (costs me the author money in lost sales) AND nobody's able to buy the book and tell their friends how great it is (costs me future sales).
The biggest threat to any artist is not copyright theft. Not by a longshot.
The biggest threat to any artist is obscurity.
If someone said they'd get your music played on the radio, but they wouldn't pay you anything for it (you get to keep your copyright though) I'm betting you'd jump at the chance because it would get your name out there and defeat obscurity for a little while.
I would expect that shoplifting physical media from stores costs artists more money than IP theft, because it simultaneously deprives you of royalties for the copies stolen AND it prevents other people from buying your work. If my local bookstore thinks it has two copies of a book on the shelf, they won't reorder it. If both copies were stolen, then not only is the author out for those two copies, but also loses because nobody else will see the books.
I'm basically rehashing a lot of Eric Flint's ideas, which can be read in an essay at his publisher's website, here.
One would suggest that comparing an economy sedan to a cadillac would equally be a ruse.
Yes, but the honda weighs a lot less. Keep in mind, this thing's the size of a Cadillac DeVille, not a shoebox Honda. Serious room for 5 full sized passengers. And it's a constant torque curve, so it'll accelerate like crazy (which is really the reason I want the 4WD). Internal combustion engines generate torque (and HP) as their RPM's increase. Fuel cells use electric motors, which have the same torque at 10 RPM as they do at 10,000 RPM.
To turn your argument around, I've got a 1 HP engine in a radio controlled car, and it'll do 60. Some others will do 85 with not much more power. So Honda's not living up to that standard! How dare they produce inefficient cars that take 90 HP to get to 120 MPH.
Yeah, I really don't like the interface in the prototype. Fortunately, it's skinnable also. So you can have a car with pedals. Part of the review says that it'll be a better car without pedals because the steering wheel will have a better range of motion. However, if you are handicapped and missing legs or something this would provide a great deal of independence I'd think.
I was pretty impressed with the performance specs. 97+ MPH out of 130ish horespower is not bad. When they can pull 200 HP out of it and have 4 wheel drive (more for safe delivery of power than offroad, think Audi Quattro not Land Rover) and you'll have something I'll want to buy. Oh, and 250-300 mile range would be good also.
Begs the question of "how do you measure fuel economy". MPG (or L/100Km) is a bit off, unless you measure the capacity at STP. I think we need to go to a straightforward percentage (how many joules were liberated and how much forward momentum/sec was generated).
The concurrent argument goes like this. Find a gun control advocate. Have them put up a large, well lit sign in their front yard that says "I'm a gun control advocate. I don't have any guns!". Count the amount of time that elapses between when the sign goes up and the house gets robbed.
(the other fun part of this would be to find a gun nut and have them put up the same sign. I think you might find that crime rates go down as the number of dead criminals increases)
I don't have to own a gun as long as I have the ability to purchase one the bad guys out there will never know if I do or not.
Mozilla doesn't tend to work as well for browsing becase...wait for it...many web pages are specifically written for the rendering bugs in IE.
Yup, it's true. IE doesn't just have security bugs, it's also got rendering problems. Of course, so does everyone else. I can go to a dozen different pages on our intranet and find where they've coded specifically around IE bugs to the extent of making the page unusable on any of the 3 browsers I've got loaded, one of which includes IE for the Mac.