The thing is, USA ain't particularily unregulated. It just has few restraint on giant corporations.
Private individuals and their freedoms, on the other hand, are increasingly regulated and on many areas considerably more so than in many other countries.
Stem-cell research is under fire.
Self-decided abortion is controversial.
Gay marriage is controversial.
You need to be 18 to have sex, 21 for a beer.
Huge parts of certain population-groups are imprisoned, many for small drug-offences.
It's illegal to tell people how to break certain types of locks. Even if the lock protect their own property.
You have to give up a huge amount of personal info, including biometrics, to even be allowed into the USA.
It's attempted again and again to outlaw or seriously hamper acts of speech, such as publishing a video-game.
SLAPs where getting so much out of hand that several states saw fit to enact special anti-SLAP laws.
Meanwhile, if you're SONY, you can rootkit thousands of peoples computers and get of with giving those affected a $5 rebate coupon of the PS3 or something.
I'm not nessecarily talking so much about more or less restraints.
I'm talking about a balance. Currently it seems USA is giving more and more power, wealth and influence to a tiny elite, and at the same time loose more and more of your fundamental freedoms for the general man in the street. I'm not too happy about that.
Why can't you configure even basic, standard stuff in Windows ?
It's fine with defaults, but why aren't these things configurable ? What is this, Gnome ?
I want focus follows mouse. I *don't* want autoraise on focus. I *dont* want autoraise on click. I *do* want drop to the bottom of the stack on some easily accessible hotkey. I *do* like the current selection available to paste. I *do* want to use the middle mousebutton for something sensible when selecting text.
My point ain't which defaults are better. I don't care. But strange is that on each and every of these points, KDE/Linux are capable of emulating windows behaviour, if you so choose. (even has a "Redmond" setup that does the work for you) while Windows does not seem to, out of the box, be able to emulate *any* of this useful behaviour.
I'm guessing people will tell me there are undocumented registry-tweaks for some of this. Fine. That still brings us on par with Gnome, tops...
There are more programs available for Windows. That really is the entirety of its advantage currently. The infrastructure on the other hand sucks.
Unless offcourse the backdoor was mathemathically proven to be only usable by knowing some secret key used while generating the backdoor.
In other words, it could be that encrypting with AES and one secret key in reality is equivalent to encrypting with two different secret keys, one of which NSA holds.
May very well be propaganda. Wanna know where I got the numbers from ? CIA world factbook. Go check them yourself. The only one I corrected was that for unemployment as those have changed much since CIA got their numbers. (now at about 2.4% here)
But ok. I admit it. You're rigth. I don't think USA is a bad place to live. Certainly nowhere near as bad as some of those 3rd world countries I mentioned. To the contrary, you're definitely among the better places to live. (allthough I *do* have a feeling that the last 5 years or so you've been moving in the worng direction, particularily on personal freedoms, state surveillance and corporate abuse)
I'm not in any way shape or form convinced that, for example, Norway is a better place to live overall.
I am however *fully* convinced that the trend in the USA where a tiny elite get an ever-increasing part of the total pie is a wrong trend. USA could be an even better place to live if this trend was reversed, and the rigths of people started counting a little more compared to the rigths of corporations and the rigths of money.
I don't think we really disagree all that much. What I mainly wanted to do -- which you seem to agree with anyway -- is point out that it's increasingly turning into a problem over by you that you concentrate ever more wealth and power into the hands of a tiny elite. And to point out that the "American" way ain't uncontroversially automatically always the best one.
Isn't it strange by the way, that Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the 3 EU-countries you singled out as being "cherry-picked" for doing well are precisely the countries with the most robust welfare-states in Europe, those with governments that Americans would most likely consider "Socialist", those with *most* worker-protection rigths ?
The suggested age is crap though. It's tailored to religious nutcases.
Show a naked breast -- instant 16. Chop the head of people -- 12, unless lots of blood gushes, in which case 16.
Blowjob ? 18 for sure ! Beating random people up with a baseball-bat and getting points for style ? 16.
Unless you're a religious nutcase completely locked up about sex, the rating-system is no substitute for making up your own damn opinion. But I guess that's too much work for some parents.
That's odd, all the studies and anecdotal evidence presented to me suggest otherwise. I don't think the universities themselves are better, you're just more likely to make better contacts here than abroad. And the only reason for that is because Americans have money and a lot of them use it to invest (as Paul pointed out).
Hint: Any generalisation that starts with dividing the world into two pieces, America and "abroad", is wrong.
Hint: "Abroad" is a pretty diverse place, Sudan and Luxenburg ain't really all that comparable.
If you merely meant to say Americans have money, compared to the average population of earth, and invest a lot, compared to the average of the world. Then this is obvious and pointless. The same is true for all western Democracies.
Do Americans have and invest particularily much money compared to say Swiss, Norwegians, Japanese or Finns ?
I don't think that's anywhere close to uncontroversial. Nor am I convinced a single scale of "better" and "worse" can be agreed upon for a university.
A university is a complex institutuion with a large number of sometimes conflicting goals. It's not easy even agreeing on what those goals should be precisely, or how they should be weigthed against eachothers. Much less which university achieve them the best.
There's good universities in the USA by any measure. Sure. But the same is true for many other countries. I doubt a universal agreement which is "best" can be reached. But I'm unsurprised that Americans consider theirs to be.
It depends. In the case of AES, it's perfectly possible, if not very likely, that the NSA is aware of some weakness the rest of us doesn't know about. It's even possible they had a finger in subtly changing AES to deliberately have this weakness.
I don't find it particularily likely, but it's perfectly possible. And I'd definitely accept that as a backdoor. The typical definition of backdoor is something like deliberate hole in security, often put in by the designers and/or creators of the product in question.
An encryption-standard with a deliberate, undisclosed, weakness would qualify, or atleast I don't see any reason why you'd disqualify it.
It's a reasonable expectation seeing as this "paper" is made from very very thin fibers, thus having a hell of a lot of very very tiny holes, that it can be used for filtration.
Sure there are programs only for Windows for which there's no exact linux replica.
The same is true the other way though. I'm currently for practical reasons running Windows on my laptop (because current employer runs that, and it just ends up being easier overall getting the job done.)
Privately, it drives me nuts, I regret not having made the thing dualboot.
There's no Kphotoalbum, picasa is available from Google, and tries to solve sorta the same problem, but frankly it doesn't measure up. It has lots more eyecandy but much less funcionality. I'm not aware of any other sub-$1000 program even playing in the same ballpark.
Mail clients is a hassle. Thunderbird is barely acceptable, yet fails to manage a lot of stuff I've been taking for granted for years. Simple stuff that mutt, pine and kmail all manage. Yes, it's possible it can be convinced to do something similar, but atleast it's not equally trivial.
Development-tools all have to be installed manually. And they tend to be more opaque than I'm used to. When they fail, they do so with much less information that migth help. Frequently the best advice amounts to "reinstall".
One can install CygWin, but the tools under cygwin are a lot less polished than under a real *nix.
There are a lot of benefits to us as a group but it can be very harsh on particular individuals (such as the guy who spent 50k on training and now is being outsourced).
The thing is, I don't see any evidence of these benefits to you as a group. You're sligthly richer than the average of the european union, but the wealth is much less distributed. I guess that's a benefit to you if you belong in the top 10% of the earners. In, for example, Norway the poorest and richest 10% earn respectively 4% and 20% of the total income. (so in other words an average "rich guy" has 5 times the income of an average "poor guy"), in USA the corresponding numbers are 1.8% and 30.5%, the average rich guy has 17 times the income of the average poor.
This puts you on par with 3rd world countries with a small elite abusing the large majority, countries like Botswana, South-Africa and Sudan have similarily poor distribution of wealth as do you. I guess if you like it that way....
The european economies have a lot of...
Any sentence that starts like that is wrong. Europe is not a country. European economies span from more rigthwing than the USA and to welfare-socialism like in Sweden.
protections for individuals but they sacrifice a lot of benefits as a group (which affects a lot of individuals such as students who can't get their first job).
I don't see any evidence of this. Unemployment is twice as high in USA as in Norway. USA compared to Europe shows a divers picture, some countries (i.e. Germany, which are pretty free-market hip by the way) have a high unemployment rate, others have a lower. There's no trend that unemployment is higher in more free-market happy economies. (more like the oposite actually)
Both have their benefits and advantages. I can't form an honest opinion since there is so much propaganda about how great things are going here and I'm sure you have the same propaganda there.
No. In germany, for example (which I know well, having lived there for over 4 years) it can be argued that the major topic is, not how great things are, but how bad they are. Their current attempt is relinguish worker-rigths to decrease internal friction. There's no signs that this is working, unemployment has remained stubbornly high over the last 5-6 years, and growth is at under 1% yearly.
Allowing an employer to fire someone who is doing his job perfectly competently, in a branch of the company which is turning a tidy profit, because the profit could, according to some spreadsheet, be even higher if someone from India did the job may (or may not) benefit the economy.
I'm pretty certain it does not benefit the sum total of the inhabitants in the country.
That's your opinion. It's not the opinion of the majority of norwegian politicians, or norwegians in general.
The theory is that removing "artificial barriers" like these will decrease friction and lead to a higher productivity, benefiting the country as a sum.
Yet there's not really much evidence supporting this. If you look at countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway that have strong worker-protection laws, it's hard to show that they experience less productivity or less growth than comparable countries with weak worker-protection laws.
Furthermore this ignores the fact (well, to most Europeans it's a fact anyway, not so sure for some Americans) that the goal isn't high productivity or high growth per se. The goal is improving the living-conditions (not just material, in all respects!) of those living in the country.
Measured by this yardstick lessening worker and consumer protections can easily be a net loss even if it does suceed in generating more wealth total.
True. But only up til the point where tcp-connection gets dropped, or one level higher, until the user gets fed up and decided to hand up his voIP call. At that point traffic decreases.
The problem is that cars require large amounts of energy. You don't notice this so much normally, because petrol is amazingly good at storing energy. A single liter of the stuff holds as much energy as 10KWh.
The best comercially available solar-cells can capture 20% of the energy as electricity, assuming they're angled directly at the sun, kept cool (efficiency sinks with raised temperature), and always in direct sunligth, a square meter of solar panel can capture up to perhaps 150W.
In other words, a solar-panel one square meter large needs to be in direct sunligth for 65 hours continously to generate the same energy as in a single liter of petrol. (that's 250 hours for a single gallong of petrol)
Now, you migth be able to fit more than 1 square meter (11 square feet) of solar-panel on a car. Perhaps even 5 times that. But on the other hand the panel will get hot, and it won't in sunligth around-the-clock and the extra weigth will increase the powerconsumption of the car.
Summary: Mounting solar-panels on your car *migth*, if you live somewhere sunny, and park the car always in wide-open sunny places, allow you to drive for perhaps 10-20 miles a week.
If you want to mount solar, a much better bet is to mount it at your roof, I can easily see a future where solar-panels will replace current roofing. Advantages include:
Much larger than your car, a 100 square meter roof is perfectly average for a single-family home, add in the garage and such and I imagine the average family living in a detached house could easily fit 200 square meters of solar-panel.
This could produce up to about 40.000 W of electricity, assuming it's sunny and it's all directed at the sun etc. In practice you're lucky to get half that, so let's call it 20KW on sunny days.
Many places in the USA, the demand on the grid is highest on warm sunny days, it's ideal to have extra production where people live exactly at those days.
A little bit of extra weigth is less of a problem on a roof than on a car.
Roofs don't need to be collision-safe and various other concerns on a moving vehicle.
This'll happen by itself the moment the amortized value of the power you can produce is higher than the prices a consumer must otherwise pay for electricity off the grid. Currently we're like a factor of 2-4 away from that, depending on where you live, the sunhours there and the electricity-prices there.
But it's one thing when an employee has voluntarily quit his job, or is retiring, to ask him to train his replacement as his last task. That makes sense, and I can't imagine anyone thinking differently.
Neither is the case here. You where not planning on leaving. You are not superfluous, the job you where doing is still going to get done. Only they'll hire some Indian for 1/3rd the price.
That is not standard. Infact in many countries in the world it would be downrigth illegal. Under Norwegian law, for example, you can only fire people if a) they failed to do their job or otherwise to uphold their part of the work-agreement. b) The job they are doing is no longer going to be done and you can't possibly use them in some other position in your company. Or c) Your company is experiencing a lack of business and needs to reduce the workstaff to stay in the black.
"We make a profit now, but we'll make even more of a profit if we fire you and hire an indian to do your job", simply ain't on the list of acceptable excuses.
Requiring you to actively assist in such an undertaking just adds insult to injury.
Yes, I realize americans don't enjoy much, if any, protection against being fired for any reason at all. I'm just saying it's not all that strange to be upset about this -- seeing that in many parts of the world people where upset enough about this kind of shit to make it illegal.
The journalist had a linguistic problem. Normally, he could say in the brigth dayligth. Only, it was nigth. And most people would, if not instructed otherwise, assume nigth to be dark.
"It could be seen even in the brigthness of nigth" ? Sounds strange too. There's such a thing as a moonlit nigth, so why not invent a sunlit nigth ? We do get those -- once you get north of the polar circle. (and even in southern Norway, like Stavanger where I live, you can still have sun until like 11pm.)
Guess what, it makes a *difference* if you hit the centre of a densely populated city, or if you hit some mountains where the main casualties are trees in the surrounding. Hint: when there's -zero- buildings within 20km of the strike-zone it's not that surprising that the human casualties in this case was zero. (as far as we know anyway)
1)bandwidth is already plentiful; we're talking about hypothetical harms here. (For the record, I actually downgraded my broadband a few months ago, with absolutely no complaints).
If this was universally true, then paying extra to have your traffic prioritized would make no sense -- on a non-full network all packets arrive in a timely manner. The fact that Telecom considers selling this, and thinks they'll get buyers, tells me that either you're wrong. Or they're considering purposefully delaying "non-prioritized" traffic. It's a simple matter to configure a router so that f.ex. voIP is only usable with high priority. This represents a step backwards from todays situation. Furthermore, earning money from selling "high priority" gives them an incentive to ensure that non-prioritized traffic moves more sluggishly.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough.
Many consumers will have little/no choise. Internet is today an utility, going without is as unthinkable to many as going without telephone. Many consumers are on 12-month contracts and cannot get out on short notice. Many consumers have only one, or only a small handful of broadband-providers available.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
That is naive. And I hope you see it. More likely they'll have some high-profile agreements with some high-desirability content-producers essentially as marketing. People will *prefer* using that ISP, because by them you can get the newest Disney-shite or whatever at "guaranteed high speed". Those people will get sluggish access to for example your content, unless you bend over and pay what is demanded. If you *do* bend over and pay, you're back to status quo -- your traffic has the same priority as that from Disney.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
Perhaps it's arrogant. But I'd take a wager that 9 out of 10 broadband-subscribers couldn't even tell you what "net neutrality " means. How can they choose intelligently when they don't even know there's a choise to be made ?
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from.
Agreed. They shouldn't be. But many are. My mothers choises for broadband just last month went up from zero to 1. Any "choise" she has is illusoric at best. (in *principle* she could go back to metered dial-up access at $1/hour, but that's not much of a choise...)
I find it suspicious that no mention is made of the achieved energy-density in these experiments, other than that it's "higher" than conventional supercaps.
The thing is, one kg of petrol holds around 45MJ of energy. One kg of NiMH batteries hold around 0.25MJ, a factor of almost 200 less. A lead-acid battery holds half that. A normal capacitor holds 0.002 MJ/kg.
So, even to compare with lead-acid batteries in energy-storage this thing needs to be 50 times better than normal capacitors.
Recharging in seconds is fine, assuming you can build a sensible car that goes oh say 100 miles at the least between recharges, that's perfectly acceptable for most people. Same for cellphones; faster recharging is very nice. But only if you can still go for 2-3 days without recharging, and talk on the phone for atleast an hour or two before its empty.
A car that could only go 20 miles between recharges would not be a hit, not even if the recharge was done in a minute.
Either they use DRM and whatever other shit they can come up with to try to control the work. In this case the work, in its unprotected form, never gets "published" at all, so it should have no legal protection whatsoever.
Or, they *do* publish the work, by making the work available to the general public. In which case a copyrigth with a sensible timeout is acceptable. The original 14 years sounds acceptable to me, even though I think 10 years would be sufficient as really the world is changing a lot faster these days.
Their original contract allows for a modification of the terms and conditions. What is the problem there? If you agree that the contract can be changed, accept it. If you disagree, don't accept it. The market works because if people don't want modifiable contracts, they wouldn't exist.
That assumes that both parts in the negotiation is about equally informed and have about equal influence on the outcome, which typically isn't the case in consumer-purchases.
There are certain things you cannot sign away in a contract. As written, if interpreted literally, you sign away everything when buying from iTunes, yet I doubt even a US court would uphold that.
Apple can change the contract unilaterally after you buy. So, what would you do if you bougth a song on iTunes today, and tomorrow Apple changed the contract to say you need to pay Apple an additional $5 million, or hand over your firstborn.
Would you honor this ? Would you expect a US court to enforce it ?
Norway has stricter consumer protection laws than the US. There are *more* things you can't sign away as a consumer here than there is in the USA. (but they exist also in USA) We like it that way. We're a democracy. We decided we want our law to be like that. Apple (or you !) don't have to like it. They're free to not do business in Norway if they so please.
What they're not free to do is doing business in Norway without being subject to Norwegian law.
Aftenposten is in general a very serious and well-respected newspaper. But for some reason, their english articles on the web (only a _tiny_ fraction of all articles) is always Simpsonesque. For some reason they always chose to translate exactly the strangest articles. No idea why.
Aside from that, living in Norway it's not really hard to see that there's a core of truth in the inspiration of many Monty Python sketches. There's some seriously strange stuff going on. (allthough I'm fairly sure that's true in most countries, otherwise they'd be boring)
Both are definitely bad. But neither may be unlawful in Norway, that was merely one point among literally dozens that the ombudsmann wanted Apples comments on.
Other points included:
Apples rules say they can unilaterally change the rules *after* you bougth a song. That is not allowable under Norwegian law. A sale is final, the rules agreed to at the time of sale needs to stay effective after the sale.
Apple claim that English law shall govern any dispute. That's not allowable for a service offered by a Norwegian branch, using a norwegian domain, in norwegian, marketed at norwegian consumers. Norwegian law applies in Norway, Apple can accept that or withdraw (fat chance!).
Apple disclaims *all* liability, even such as migth arise as a result of gross neglience or purposeful actions by Apple. That's not allowable under Norwegian law. (neither US, I'm pretty sure)
Apple states that all risks arising from their handling of your personal data is carried by you. (not them) That's not allowable. If *they* for example, lose your credit-card number or whatever, they are certainly responsible for any arising loss, if they like it or not.
The terms of use are grossly unbalanced. It talks only of apples rigths and consumers duties. Yet it neglects to mention any of Apples duties and consumers rigths. Even where such exist. This makes it misleading.
DRM prevents consumers from doing certain things they are acusomed to being able to do with music. Information about this is very much lacking. Nowhere does it inform you that you can't resell, lend or give away your music. Nowhere does it say that your music-collection may be gone the day your player-device breaks. Nowhere does it say that the ability to move music to for example a new computer is dependent upon Apple still being in business, and Apple choosing to (in the future) grant you this ability. (nowhere do they promise this ability) Important restrictions like these should be prominently displayed.
The terms of use forbid cracking the DRM -- even if that is needed to for example access the music you bougth and paid for after Apple stops producing compatible players.
There was (lots!) more. But this will do for starters.
That may be an interesting question in general, but it's not relevant here. Apple is clearly operatingin the Norwegian market, marketing directly to Norwegian consumers as evidenced by:
They have a website in Norwegian.
Served from a.no domain.
Marketing this in Norwegian media.
Infact one of the terms of use that the ombudsmann was critical of (due to free market concerns) was a point wherein customer has to consent to *ONLY* use the service in Norway.
Infact you can only buy from the norwegian itunes-store using a norwegian credit-card or norwegian bank-account.
Under *these* circumstances, claiming that they're under English law (not US) is clearly not going to stick.
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Private individuals and their freedoms, on the other hand, are increasingly regulated and on many areas considerably more so than in many other countries.
Meanwhile, if you're SONY, you can rootkit thousands of peoples computers and get of with giving those affected a $5 rebate coupon of the PS3 or something.
I'm not nessecarily talking so much about more or less restraints.
I'm talking about a balance. Currently it seems USA is giving more and more power, wealth and influence to a tiny elite, and at the same time loose more and more of your fundamental freedoms for the general man in the street. I'm not too happy about that.
It's fine with defaults, but why aren't these things configurable ? What is this, Gnome ?
I want focus follows mouse. I *don't* want autoraise on focus. I *dont* want autoraise on click. I *do* want drop to the bottom of the stack on some easily accessible hotkey. I *do* like the current selection available to paste. I *do* want to use the middle mousebutton for something sensible when selecting text.
My point ain't which defaults are better. I don't care. But strange is that on each and every of these points, KDE/Linux are capable of emulating windows behaviour, if you so choose. (even has a "Redmond" setup that does the work for you) while Windows does not seem to, out of the box, be able to emulate *any* of this useful behaviour.
I'm guessing people will tell me there are undocumented registry-tweaks for some of this. Fine. That still brings us on par with Gnome, tops...
There are more programs available for Windows. That really is the entirety of its advantage currently. The infrastructure on the other hand sucks.
In other words, it could be that encrypting with AES and one secret key in reality is equivalent to encrypting with two different secret keys, one of which NSA holds.
I agree this is mindbogglingly unlikely.
But ok. I admit it. You're rigth. I don't think USA is a bad place to live. Certainly nowhere near as bad as some of those 3rd world countries I mentioned. To the contrary, you're definitely among the better places to live. (allthough I *do* have a feeling that the last 5 years or so you've been moving in the worng direction, particularily on personal freedoms, state surveillance and corporate abuse)
I'm not in any way shape or form convinced that, for example, Norway is a better place to live overall.
I am however *fully* convinced that the trend in the USA where a tiny elite get an ever-increasing part of the total pie is a wrong trend. USA could be an even better place to live if this trend was reversed, and the rigths of people started counting a little more compared to the rigths of corporations and the rigths of money.
I don't think we really disagree all that much. What I mainly wanted to do -- which you seem to agree with anyway -- is point out that it's increasingly turning into a problem over by you that you concentrate ever more wealth and power into the hands of a tiny elite. And to point out that the "American" way ain't uncontroversially automatically always the best one.
Isn't it strange by the way, that Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the 3 EU-countries you singled out as being "cherry-picked" for doing well are precisely the countries with the most robust welfare-states in Europe, those with governments that Americans would most likely consider "Socialist", those with *most* worker-protection rigths ?
Could be a coincidence.... could be.
Show a naked breast -- instant 16. Chop the head of people -- 12, unless lots of blood gushes, in which case 16.
Blowjob ? 18 for sure ! Beating random people up with a baseball-bat and getting points for style ? 16.
Unless you're a religious nutcase completely locked up about sex, the rating-system is no substitute for making up your own damn opinion. But I guess that's too much work for some parents.
Hint: Any generalisation that starts with dividing the world into two pieces, America and "abroad", is wrong.
Hint: "Abroad" is a pretty diverse place, Sudan and Luxenburg ain't really all that comparable.
If you merely meant to say Americans have money, compared to the average population of earth, and invest a lot, compared to the average of the world. Then this is obvious and pointless. The same is true for all western Democracies.
Do Americans have and invest particularily much money compared to say Swiss, Norwegians, Japanese or Finns ?
I don't think that's anywhere close to uncontroversial. Nor am I convinced a single scale of "better" and "worse" can be agreed upon for a university.
A university is a complex institutuion with a large number of sometimes conflicting goals. It's not easy even agreeing on what those goals should be precisely, or how they should be weigthed against eachothers. Much less which university achieve them the best.
There's good universities in the USA by any measure. Sure. But the same is true for many other countries. I doubt a universal agreement which is "best" can be reached. But I'm unsurprised that Americans consider theirs to be.
I don't find it particularily likely, but it's perfectly possible. And I'd definitely accept that as a backdoor. The typical definition of backdoor is something like deliberate hole in security, often put in by the designers and/or creators of the product in question.
An encryption-standard with a deliberate, undisclosed, weakness would qualify, or atleast I don't see any reason why you'd disqualify it.
The same is true the other way though. I'm currently for practical reasons running Windows on my laptop (because current employer runs that, and it just ends up being easier overall getting the job done.)
Privately, it drives me nuts, I regret not having made the thing dualboot.
There's no Kphotoalbum, picasa is available from Google, and tries to solve sorta the same problem, but frankly it doesn't measure up. It has lots more eyecandy but much less funcionality. I'm not aware of any other sub-$1000 program even playing in the same ballpark.
Mail clients is a hassle. Thunderbird is barely acceptable, yet fails to manage a lot of stuff I've been taking for granted for years. Simple stuff that mutt, pine and kmail all manage. Yes, it's possible it can be convinced to do something similar, but atleast it's not equally trivial.
Development-tools all have to be installed manually. And they tend to be more opaque than I'm used to. When they fail, they do so with much less information that migth help. Frequently the best advice amounts to "reinstall".
One can install CygWin, but the tools under cygwin are a lot less polished than under a real *nix.
The thing is, I don't see any evidence of these benefits to you as a group. You're sligthly richer than the average of the european union, but the wealth is much less distributed. I guess that's a benefit to you if you belong in the top 10% of the earners. In, for example, Norway the poorest and richest 10% earn respectively 4% and 20% of the total income. (so in other words an average "rich guy" has 5 times the income of an average "poor guy"), in USA the corresponding numbers are 1.8% and 30.5%, the average rich guy has 17 times the income of the average poor.
This puts you on par with 3rd world countries with a small elite abusing the large majority, countries like Botswana, South-Africa and Sudan have similarily poor distribution of wealth as do you. I guess if you like it that way ....
The european economies have a lot of ...
Any sentence that starts like that is wrong. Europe is not a country. European economies span from more rigthwing than the USA and to welfare-socialism like in Sweden.
protections for individuals but they sacrifice a lot of benefits as a group (which affects a lot of individuals such as students who can't get their first job).
I don't see any evidence of this. Unemployment is twice as high in USA as in Norway. USA compared to Europe shows a divers picture, some countries (i.e. Germany, which are pretty free-market hip by the way) have a high unemployment rate, others have a lower. There's no trend that unemployment is higher in more free-market happy economies. (more like the oposite actually)
Both have their benefits and advantages. I can't form an honest opinion since there is so much propaganda about how great things are going here and I'm sure you have the same propaganda there.
No. In germany, for example (which I know well, having lived there for over 4 years) it can be argued that the major topic is, not how great things are, but how bad they are. Their current attempt is relinguish worker-rigths to decrease internal friction. There's no signs that this is working, unemployment has remained stubbornly high over the last 5-6 years, and growth is at under 1% yearly.
Allowing an employer to fire someone who is doing his job perfectly competently, in a branch of the company which is turning a tidy profit, because the profit could, according to some spreadsheet, be even higher if someone from India did the job may (or may not) benefit the economy.
I'm pretty certain it does not benefit the sum total of the inhabitants in the country.
The theory is that removing "artificial barriers" like these will decrease friction and lead to a higher productivity, benefiting the country as a sum.
Yet there's not really much evidence supporting this. If you look at countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway that have strong worker-protection laws, it's hard to show that they experience less productivity or less growth than comparable countries with weak worker-protection laws.
Furthermore this ignores the fact (well, to most Europeans it's a fact anyway, not so sure for some Americans) that the goal isn't high productivity or high growth per se. The goal is improving the living-conditions (not just material, in all respects!) of those living in the country.
Measured by this yardstick lessening worker and consumer protections can easily be a net loss even if it does suceed in generating more wealth total.
You are guilty until you yourself can prove your innocense ? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around ?
True. But only up til the point where tcp-connection gets dropped, or one level higher, until the user gets fed up and decided to hand up his voIP call. At that point traffic decreases.
The best comercially available solar-cells can capture 20% of the energy as electricity, assuming they're angled directly at the sun, kept cool (efficiency sinks with raised temperature), and always in direct sunligth, a square meter of solar panel can capture up to perhaps 150W.
In other words, a solar-panel one square meter large needs to be in direct sunligth for 65 hours continously to generate the same energy as in a single liter of petrol. (that's 250 hours for a single gallong of petrol)
Now, you migth be able to fit more than 1 square meter (11 square feet) of solar-panel on a car. Perhaps even 5 times that. But on the other hand the panel will get hot, and it won't in sunligth around-the-clock and the extra weigth will increase the powerconsumption of the car.
Summary: Mounting solar-panels on your car *migth*, if you live somewhere sunny, and park the car always in wide-open sunny places, allow you to drive for perhaps 10-20 miles a week.
If you want to mount solar, a much better bet is to mount it at your roof, I can easily see a future where solar-panels will replace current roofing. Advantages include:
This'll happen by itself the moment the amortized value of the power you can produce is higher than the prices a consumer must otherwise pay for electricity off the grid. Currently we're like a factor of 2-4 away from that, depending on where you live, the sunhours there and the electricity-prices there.
How many articles like it are they likely to get ?
But it's one thing when an employee has voluntarily quit his job, or is retiring, to ask him to train his replacement as his last task. That makes sense, and I can't imagine anyone thinking differently.
Neither is the case here. You where not planning on leaving. You are not superfluous, the job you where doing is still going to get done. Only they'll hire some Indian for 1/3rd the price.
That is not standard. Infact in many countries in the world it would be downrigth illegal. Under Norwegian law, for example, you can only fire people if a) they failed to do their job or otherwise to uphold their part of the work-agreement. b) The job they are doing is no longer going to be done and you can't possibly use them in some other position in your company. Or c) Your company is experiencing a lack of business and needs to reduce the workstaff to stay in the black.
"We make a profit now, but we'll make even more of a profit if we fire you and hire an indian to do your job", simply ain't on the list of acceptable excuses.
Requiring you to actively assist in such an undertaking just adds insult to injury.
Yes, I realize americans don't enjoy much, if any, protection against being fired for any reason at all. I'm just saying it's not all that strange to be upset about this -- seeing that in many parts of the world people where upset enough about this kind of shit to make it illegal.
"It could be seen even in the brigthness of nigth" ? Sounds strange too. There's such a thing as a moonlit nigth, so why not invent a sunlit nigth ? We do get those -- once you get north of the polar circle. (and even in southern Norway, like Stavanger where I live, you can still have sun until like 11pm.)
Guess what, it makes a *difference* if you hit the centre of a densely populated city, or if you hit some mountains where the main casualties are trees in the surrounding. Hint: when there's -zero- buildings within 20km of the strike-zone it's not that surprising that the human casualties in this case was zero. (as far as we know anyway)
If this was universally true, then paying extra to have your traffic prioritized would make no sense -- on a non-full network all packets arrive in a timely manner. The fact that Telecom considers selling this, and thinks they'll get buyers, tells me that either you're wrong. Or they're considering purposefully delaying "non-prioritized" traffic. It's a simple matter to configure a router so that f.ex. voIP is only usable with high priority. This represents a step backwards from todays situation. Furthermore, earning money from selling "high priority" gives them an incentive to ensure that non-prioritized traffic moves more sluggishly.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough.
Many consumers will have little/no choise. Internet is today an utility, going without is as unthinkable to many as going without telephone. Many consumers are on 12-month contracts and cannot get out on short notice. Many consumers have only one, or only a small handful of broadband-providers available.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
That is naive. And I hope you see it. More likely they'll have some high-profile agreements with some high-desirability content-producers essentially as marketing. People will *prefer* using that ISP, because by them you can get the newest Disney-shite or whatever at "guaranteed high speed". Those people will get sluggish access to for example your content, unless you bend over and pay what is demanded. If you *do* bend over and pay, you're back to status quo -- your traffic has the same priority as that from Disney.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
Perhaps it's arrogant. But I'd take a wager that 9 out of 10 broadband-subscribers couldn't even tell you what "net neutrality " means. How can they choose intelligently when they don't even know there's a choise to be made ?
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from.
Agreed. They shouldn't be. But many are. My mothers choises for broadband just last month went up from zero to 1. Any "choise" she has is illusoric at best. (in *principle* she could go back to metered dial-up access at $1/hour, but that's not much of a choise...)
The thing is, one kg of petrol holds around 45MJ of energy. One kg of NiMH batteries hold around 0.25MJ, a factor of almost 200 less. A lead-acid battery holds half that. A normal capacitor holds 0.002 MJ/kg.
So, even to compare with lead-acid batteries in energy-storage this thing needs to be 50 times better than normal capacitors.
Recharging in seconds is fine, assuming you can build a sensible car that goes oh say 100 miles at the least between recharges, that's perfectly acceptable for most people. Same for cellphones; faster recharging is very nice. But only if you can still go for 2-3 days without recharging, and talk on the phone for atleast an hour or two before its empty.
A car that could only go 20 miles between recharges would not be a hit, not even if the recharge was done in a minute.
Publishers should have a choise:
Either they use DRM and whatever other shit they can come up with to try to control the work. In this case the work, in its unprotected form, never gets "published" at all, so it should have no legal protection whatsoever.
Or, they *do* publish the work, by making the work available to the general public. In which case a copyrigth with a sensible timeout is acceptable. The original 14 years sounds acceptable to me, even though I think 10 years would be sufficient as really the world is changing a lot faster these days.
That assumes that both parts in the negotiation is about equally informed and have about equal influence on the outcome, which typically isn't the case in consumer-purchases.
There are certain things you cannot sign away in a contract. As written, if interpreted literally, you sign away everything when buying from iTunes, yet I doubt even a US court would uphold that.
Apple can change the contract unilaterally after you buy. So, what would you do if you bougth a song on iTunes today, and tomorrow Apple changed the contract to say you need to pay Apple an additional $5 million, or hand over your firstborn.
Would you honor this ? Would you expect a US court to enforce it ?
Norway has stricter consumer protection laws than the US. There are *more* things you can't sign away as a consumer here than there is in the USA. (but they exist also in USA) We like it that way. We're a democracy. We decided we want our law to be like that. Apple (or you !) don't have to like it. They're free to not do business in Norway if they so please.
What they're not free to do is doing business in Norway without being subject to Norwegian law.
Aside from that, living in Norway it's not really hard to see that there's a core of truth in the inspiration of many Monty Python sketches. There's some seriously strange stuff going on. (allthough I'm fairly sure that's true in most countries, otherwise they'd be boring)
Other points included:
There was (lots!) more. But this will do for starters.
Under *these* circumstances, claiming that they're under English law (not US) is clearly not going to stick.