I disagree with the size-comment: People could and would send their entire mp3 or divx-collection around on a single disc if it would fit. 10GB on a DVD is plenty for a movie, but too small for a movie-collection.
But the benefit over DVD is quite small. going from CDROM to DVD gives you 10 times as much storage. Going from DVD to 1.st gen blu-ray gives you not even a factor of 3 -- and the price gets multiplied by like 50. Not worth it.
As someone said: at these prices, why buy 3 50GB blu-ray writables for $180 (and total capacity 150GB) sometime in the future when you even *today* can get a external-usb harddrive with 3 times the capacity, faster read/write, better compatibility, and lower defect-rate for less.
OK, so the bluray-discs are going to cost less air-freigth, that's about the only benefit I see.
But the intro-prices won't hold long anyway, I'm sure the $50/disc will fall, like all other optical media before it, by an order of magnitude in a year or two, and by two orders of magnitude as the format matures.
Hint: You're confusing two unrelated issues. They may be helping others to perform copyrigth-violations, but they are *not* helping others perform theft.
Despite the propaganda of the **AA these two are two completely unrelated crimes. Described in different laws, with different punishments, different rules, different *everything*.
Yes. Both are illegal. But you don't go calling "speeding" "rape" just because both are illegal.
The thing is, the US migth be capitalistic in principle, but in practice it's much more big-business friendly. There's nothing capitalistic about government-granted eternal-monopolies (mickey mouse act), killing first-sale (DMCA), granting big corporations the power to pretty much write law, having ineffectual anti-trust legislation, giving a patent on anything that moves (and much that does not) and so on.
Sweden (and the rest of the scandinavic countries) may have had socialist governments for most of the last 50 years. But these where freely elected governments with little in common with the dictatorships of the former east-block.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise the socialist parties are in general less willing to sacrifice the good of the community and the little man on the alter of profits for the megacorps.
On smaller purchases (not houses, unless you're a multi-millionaire) you can afford to lose a few, aslong as the expected gain is still positive.
I buy used ps2-games online. I *expect* to be ripped off once in a while. That's ok -- compared to the alternative for me, buying new in the shop, I typically save 20->70%, so even if I'm ripped off 1/10th of the time, it's still a huge win.
But like always: don't gamble what you cannot afford to lose. I *can* afford to lose the cost of a used game. Most people *cannot* afford to lose a significant portion or all of the money they invest in a house.
You're out of your mind. There's nothing wrong with stating the truth. Also nothing wrong with guestimating if you have no better info. Also nothing wrong with using download-numbers to guesstimate users. Yes, the estimates will be very very rough, but as you correctly point out, there's no better alternative really.
What's so fucking wrong with writing: "Over 100 million downloads", "2 million downloads a week" ?
Why do you feel the need to convert that to, not only users, but *NEW* users ? What's the point ? You know you can't do it without likely missing your mark by a large factor, in one or the other direction, so why ?
Firefox is a good product. It should be more than possible to market it using a less braindead argument than: All the others are using it, so you should too.
I was just stating that "Millions of new users every week" is, plain and simple, a lie.
You expect advertising to be lying -- or if you don't, you end up making a lot of very very stupid decisions mostly in the category that separates you from your money while giving you nothing worthwhile in return.
But expecting something, and finding the same thing OK, accpetable, fine is two different things.
Get a decent wifi-router, like for example the Liksys WRT54GL, which has Linux on it. Open the administrative interface and make a tick under "Use ip-kung-fu", then tell it the macs of all in-house machines.
Result ? No machine can saturate the link to the point where you start getting queing, and non-prefered machines (i.e. all with a mac not on the list of your machines) are at all times limited to using max 80% of the bandwith your machines *aren't* using. (i.e. they'll never be able to use more than idle-bandwith), if you want to be nice you can additionally say that even non-preferred machines get a minimum of oh say 2kb/s each, so that strangers can still check their email, even when you are using bittorrent.
They didn't use this claim as a "slogan", however the sentence is a direct quote from the last paragraph of the latest press-release. I agree. It's fine to say "100 million downloads" if you really had that many downloads, it's not the fault of Firefox that many people are unable to interpret a correct, plain sentence.
But claiming that you've got "millions of new users every week" is a bald-faced lie. They don't. Depending on your assumption they may or may not have half a million new users a week, on average. But they certainly don't have "millions" and "every week".
You don't get the point. We all know that lots of advertising is immoral, misleading, immature, bullshit.
You can't argue that something is OK because it's similar to something else that's *NOT* OK.
Unless, offcourse, you subscribe to "It's ok to be evil as long as the other guy is too", or "aslong as we can be favourably compared to McD we're ok." or "sure we're lying, but that's common in advertising, so it's ok" or some other such nonsense.
"Millions of new users every week" *is* misleading. It's simply not true. There are about 2 million *downloads* a week, but atleast half of those are likely to be existing users upgrading or installing on multiple machines.
So, it's a lie. And that's nok ok -- not even if the other guys are lying too.
I hate to break it to you, but the "general population" are peasants with high-school education, if that.
Furthermore they use as almost their sole source of information a few large media-conglomerates that are also controlled by (you guessed it) big business.
It's all well and good to say that the general population should stop acting that way. Do you also have a plan for how to acomplish that ? Because for the last few decades the trend has been in the oposite direction: the people act ever more like that.
Sure it'll "function", in some way or another. The question is in what way it'll function, and if that's a nice future or not. A future where an increaing part of the population is seen by those in power as just a liability and a a problem has it's problems.
As for poor, unskilled workers being wanted for luxury -- I guess there'll always be a market for whores. That's true. But the set of luxuries are limited, especially for *unskilled* labourers. Yes, it's a luxury to have your own private chef -- but you're going to want somebody who can cook well. Yes it's a luxury to have a live band in your birthday-party, but you're going to want someone who sounds good. Yes it's a luxury to have you hair profesionally styled -- but that assumes the "professionally" part.
If we go back a 100 years this was different. There was lots of things to use *unskilled* labourers for. Watch the sheep. Cut wood. Dig a trench. Fetch water. Carry groceries from the market to the home. Feed the chickens. Harvest the potatoes.
Yes, many of these tasks are still done. But today you hire *one* skilled man with a modern expensive machine for a day, and he digs the trench that a hundred years ago was employment for 20 unskilled workers for a week.
Actually, that's precisely my point: measured on just about any scale you care to name I'm much richer than say my great-grandfather. The comforts I take for granted he could only dream of. Inspite of the fact that he was like among the richest 5% of his time while I'm still hardly even established.
Still, inspite of this: he employed 2 people full-time as basically servants. For him a household help and a gardener for his *vacation*home* was normal -- it was expected and reasonable.
Today, I live in luxury compared to him in just about any way, yet I employ noone, nor would I where my income to multiply by 10 tomorrow. I simply have no need for it whatsoever. Fine, there's details I'd pay for help with -- I could see getting groceries delivered. I could see having someone come by 3 hours a week to tend my garden. But that doesn't add up to anything close to 2 full-time jobs, infact it's more like 0.1 job.
Lots of the jobs that used to be done by unskilled labor are done by *machines* today. You don't need tons of people to weave cloth, saw planks, cut trees, dig trenches, or anything else like that. Yes, you need a few. But a *singe* person with a modern machine digs trenches like literally dozens of people with manual tools.
there is no limit to how far humans will go. In the future as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer people will be having kids just to sell them for parts for the rich who have destroyed their livers through drinking and lungs though smoking.
Actually both smoking and drinking correspond negatively with wealth (i.e. the poor smoke/drink more than the rich).
I actually see quite a different danger: that the poor gets increasingly irrelevant. If you go back a 100 years or so, there where poor, but there was also unskilled labor that needed to be done. One needed/wanted people to pick potatoes, harvest apples, do the dishes, wash clothes, etc.
Today, the rich (and middle-class) increasingly find they have no use for the poor whatsoever. Maximum as a "market". There's machines for doing many of the things unskilled laborers used to do. And as for servants, modern conveniences make them a lot less popular. I know, people look at me funnily because I *do* have some household-help. But fact of the matter is that central-vacuuming, machine-washing, microwave, take-away-food (good food exists too, not only pizza and chinese), etc etc etc ad nauseum has made the work of running a household significantly less than it used to be.
Because saying that you're dropping something because there is "a possibility" that it *migth* be harmful is no explanation at all. If that argument held water you'd have to ban everything. Literally.
There are no indications whatsoever that, for example, having a wifi-hotspot 5m from your bed is more harmful than having a DECT-phone 1m away, a ligthbulb 1m away, currenct-carrying wires everywhere, drinking water, wearing cotton, cutting your toenails or looking at the Cosby show.
You, additionally, annoy me by failing to have a rudimentary grasp of the very basics of science. If you did, you'd know, for example that studies will *never* be able to conclusively show that wifi is harmless. They cannot. Not even in principle. *NO* study has conclusively shown that drinking half a liter of pure water a day is not harmful. You can *never* prove a negative.
But you're rigth, this is Slashdot, it's completely futile to expect anything else.
Correlation does not prove causation. It's very well-known for anyone whos ever touched statistics with a ten-foot pole. Let me give you a few examples to show how wrong decisions you make if you assume otherwise.
Some time back there was a study done in England, showing that people living near garbage-incinerators got lung-cancer 1.5 times as often as normal people. At first it was assumed this was proof the smoke from the garbage-incinerators where causing this. A more carefuly look however, reveled that: a) people living close to the incinerator where mostly poorer than average. b) poor people smoke more often than richer people. c) infact non-smokers near the incinerator had no higher risk than non-smokers elsewhere.
See the problem ?
Or another example: A statistical analysis (this one from Norway) showed that people who drink much coffee earn less money, get (on the average) less education, and have a host of other problems. Further study however showed that that's simply because the coffee-consumption in the poorest part of Norway (the north-part) is significantly higher than elsewhere.
Or a constructed example:
Assume you where to sample 1000 computers at random to test the hypothesis: attaching an lcd-screen rather than a crt to a computer improves performance. You do this by testing the performance of each of the computers, and noting which are attached to lcds. You will find that computers that have lcds are on the average atleast twice as fast as computers that do not. Now we all know that is not because the LCD helps -- it is because lcds are common on *new* computers and uncommon on *old* computers, and new computers are usually faster than old. Attaching a lcd to your old computer won't help at all. That's because speed and lcd/crt are *correlated* but the speed is not *caused* by the lcd.
Is the point starting to drift trough to you ?
To feel sure of *causation* we need to do our damnedest to exclude all other factors to the best of our ability. Even then we can never be 100% sure -- but that's not required in any case: if we find it quite likely that something is harmful, and have evidence to support this, that's quite sufficient to be careful with whatever it was until further analysis can be made.
Smoking is a good example: The increased risk of lung-cancer (and lots of other problems) for smokers by itself doesn't prove anything. However: the difference remains no matter what we try to exclude. The difference remains even if the sample has equal age, equal jobs, equal education, equal sex, equally many kids, whatever. Infact the difference remains even if we take two samples of near-identical lab-mice, treat them (as close as we can manage) to exactly the same, *except* the *one* difference: half the mice inhale tobacco-smoke, the other half doesn't.
Apparently, there are studies that indicate the possibility of harm from wireless, but the studies (so far) are inconclusive.
"Apparently" ? What is that supposed to mean: Does such studies exist, or do they not ? And how can a study "indicate" a "possibility" of harm ? That is a nonsensical statement.
Listen: *everything* (literally) is "possibly" harmful. Really. You don't need any study to show that. Most studies are made to test some hypothesis. Let's say you have a hypothesis that children with wifi-homes get leukemia more often than other children. You can test this with a study. There's only three possible results:
The ones with wifi really get leukemia more often, often enough that it's unlikely that this is caused by mere randomness. You've found a correlation. (notice that you've *NOT* proved causation)(also assuming you didn't mess up the study)
There are no statistically significant differences between the two groups.
The ones with wifi get leukemia less often, outside of the realm that can be explained by pure chanse. You've found a negative correlation. (but again, no causation is proved !)
I suggest that there exists *no* studies that show a statistically significant correlation between EM on wifi-levels and any negative health-effects. This is no proof that they're harmless: it's only lack of indication that they're harmful.
If you think otherwise, please provide pointers to those studies that say otherwise.
It'll tell you *something*. It won't tell you *everything*. Sadly, the only way to really know how a medicine (or anything else) works on humans is to test it on in a proper double-blind study using a large sample. The problem is that we don't want to risk that unless we're first reasonable sure that there aren't large problems.
Its called the "precautionary priciple" - anything that cannot be proven safe is a candidate for banning.
Nah. You're rigth, in principle, but you're overstating it to the point where it's wrong.
First: Nothing can be "proven safe", not even in principle, much less in practice. Nobody seriously suggests banning everything. (and as others have pointed out - even that wouldn't help, because vacuum is *definitely* dangerous)
Precautions are sometimes warranted. It's a cost/benefit thing. What are the expected benefits of something, and what are the expected costs ? There are things we don't do -- because it could turn out to be very dangerous, and the benefits are small. That's not nessecarily wrong.
You just need to keep a sane balance. I think, for example, that it's quite sane to test new medicines on animals before we give them to humans -- even though they're not known to be dangerous and indeed tend to be engineered to have as few harmful effects as possible.
On the other hand, if the new medicament is the *only* (possible) cure for something with a 99% lethality, it makes no sense whatsoever to deny the medicine to those that have the disease and want to test it. (the potential downside is pretty much zero)
There's a possibility that anything could be dangerous. There are a lot of studies on the effects of electromagnetic radiation. Not *one* ha shwon any harmful effects at the levels we're here talking of. (indeed not one has shown harmfule effects at a level 100 times higher than the one we're here talking of.
If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
That site doesn't even mention perhaps the biggest advantage of metric: that the different units are compatible to eachothers.
It focuses on three issues: there's a lot less units, it's base-10, decimal is easier to work with than fractions.
These three are valid, but there's a fourth where it's even more noticeable:
It may be a pain in the butt to convert say a million inches to miles. But that's nothing compared to the pain of figuring out how many mph a 3 ton car goes after it's been pushed by a force of 1000 pounds over a time of 5 seconds (ignoring friction)
With metric it's not only doable, but trivial. If you push with a force of 1000N on a car weighing 2000Kg, it'll accelerate at 0.5m/s**2, multiply with 5 seconds and you get 2.5m/s. (if you want km/h which is more often used in daily speak, you need to divide by 3.6, that's inconvenient but it's caused by an hour having 3600 seconds, in essence hours arent base-10. It'd *be* trivial if an hour had 1000 seconds)
Current harddisks are commonly avalable up to around 500GB, a million times that would be 500PB, not 1PB. Infact a Petabyte is only 2000 times current disk-sizes.
Furthermore, if disks continues to grow as they have the last decade, doubling in size for the same price every 18 months or so, then in 4-5 years (the "estimated" release of this) it'll have doubled another 3 times, giving you 5GB disks, this is still a factor of 200 better than that -- but there's a difference between 200 and a million....
And to top it of, this is offcourse wild speculation -- any product that is claimed to be 4-5 years away from production and has not even a working prototype is pure vapor.
I tried several of energy saving bulbs. None lasted as long as they claim. Some claims 6000 hours, some 10000 hours, mine usually last for 4-5000 hours. Here (GA-USA) we pay US$0.10/kwh and considering the cost of the bulb, it was NOT worth it.
Your math must be broken. Seriously.
5000 hours of saving say 50W is 250Kwh saved. Are you really saying that the price-difference between the low-energy bulb and the normal one was more than $25 dollars ? If so, I suggest you buy your bulbs elsewhere. Hell, for that price you could have them FedExed from Europe, and it'd be cheaper by far.
So if you don't save more than the $10 extra to manufacture one energy efficient bulb, over its lifetime, in saved electricity, then you have done more harm than good.
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one. Nor where you buy yours. Like you said, it's competitive, you get good-quality bulbs for half of that today, and they typically last 5 times as long as a traditional bulb.
Still, 1 low-energy bulb tends to cost say $4 more than 5 comparable-output-and-quality traditional bulbs. It lives something like 10000 hours. Lets do maths:
Normal bulbs: 10000h*60w = 600Kwh
Low-energy: 10000h*12w = 120Kwh
Saved energy: 480Kwh
Break-even point (assuming low-energy bulbs cost $4 more upfront) 0.83 cent/kwh
I don't know what power costs where you live, but most places power costs 10 times that, delivered to the consumer. Even if your $10 was correct (which it isn't) the break-even point for this bulb would still be at 1.6cent/kwh, which is still a lot less than electricity actually costs for consumers.
It gets sligthly less beneficial if you live somewhere where the extra heat is needed part of the year so it's not simply wasted. In the extreme case: you live in a electrically heated house, and the ligth is *never* on without the ovens also being on, you save nothing at all.
You're saying the license is justified because licenses are justified. That's not terribly convincing I'm afraid.
Re:Rabbit hole goes deeper -- existing HDTVs w/ co
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The Great HDCP Fiasco
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You're rigth offcourse -- but the GP is *also* rigth.
Pirates don't need to break the protection -- they can produce a bit-for-bit copy.
But nevertheless, pirates *will* break the protection, and then they current regime, where a copy is exactly as good as the original will be replaced by the regime of the future: where they copy is significantly *better* than the original.
This is already the case with CDs. I bougth the original of Bertine Zetlitz new CD. It wouldn't rip nicely to play in my mp3-player. It doesn't work in my laptop, nor work-computer, nor in the car-stereo.
I returned it. Bougth a pirated version on a market in Poland instead: It works perfectly and has *none* of the issues the original has.
Way to go guys ! Punish the honest customers and give the pirates *another* advantage, now they're not only cheaper: they're *BETTER* too.
Slashdot Mirror
But the benefit over DVD is quite small. going from CDROM to DVD gives you 10 times as much storage. Going from DVD to 1.st gen blu-ray gives you not even a factor of 3 -- and the price gets multiplied by like 50. Not worth it.
As someone said: at these prices, why buy 3 50GB blu-ray writables for $180 (and total capacity 150GB) sometime in the future when you even *today* can get a external-usb harddrive with 3 times the capacity, faster read/write, better compatibility, and lower defect-rate for less.
OK, so the bluray-discs are going to cost less air-freigth, that's about the only benefit I see.
But the intro-prices won't hold long anyway, I'm sure the $50/disc will fall, like all other optical media before it, by an order of magnitude in a year or two, and by two orders of magnitude as the format matures.
Hint: You're confusing two unrelated issues. They may be helping others to perform copyrigth-violations, but they are *not* helping others perform theft.
Despite the propaganda of the **AA these two are two completely unrelated crimes. Described in different laws, with different punishments, different rules, different *everything*.
Yes. Both are illegal. But you don't go calling "speeding" "rape" just because both are illegal.
The thing is, the US migth be capitalistic in principle, but in practice it's much more big-business friendly. There's nothing capitalistic about government-granted eternal-monopolies (mickey mouse act), killing first-sale (DMCA), granting big corporations the power to pretty much write law, having ineffectual anti-trust legislation, giving a patent on anything that moves (and much that does not) and so on.
Sweden (and the rest of the scandinavic countries) may have had socialist governments for most of the last 50 years. But these where freely elected governments with little in common with the dictatorships of the former east-block.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise the socialist parties are in general less willing to sacrifice the good of the community and the little man on the alter of profits for the megacorps.
On smaller purchases (not houses, unless you're a multi-millionaire) you can afford to lose a few, aslong as the expected gain is still positive.
I buy used ps2-games online. I *expect* to be ripped off once in a while. That's ok -- compared to the alternative for me, buying new in the shop, I typically save 20->70%, so even if I'm ripped off 1/10th of the time, it's still a huge win.
But like always: don't gamble what you cannot afford to lose. I *can* afford to lose the cost of a used game. Most people *cannot* afford to lose a significant portion or all of the money they invest in a house.
What's so fucking wrong with writing: "Over 100 million downloads", "2 million downloads a week" ?
Why do you feel the need to convert that to, not only users, but *NEW* users ? What's the point ? You know you can't do it without likely missing your mark by a large factor, in one or the other direction, so why ?
Firefox is a good product. It should be more than possible to market it using a less braindead argument than: All the others are using it, so you should too.
I was just stating that "Millions of new users every week" is, plain and simple, a lie.
You expect advertising to be lying -- or if you don't, you end up making a lot of very very stupid decisions mostly in the category that separates you from your money while giving you nothing worthwhile in return.
But expecting something, and finding the same thing OK, accpetable, fine is two different things.
Get a decent wifi-router, like for example the Liksys WRT54GL, which has Linux on it. Open the administrative interface and make a tick under "Use ip-kung-fu", then tell it the macs of all in-house machines.
Result ? No machine can saturate the link to the point where you start getting queing, and non-prefered machines (i.e. all with a mac not on the list of your machines) are at all times limited to using max 80% of the bandwith your machines *aren't* using. (i.e. they'll never be able to use more than idle-bandwith), if you want to be nice you can additionally say that even non-preferred machines get a minimum of oh say 2kb/s each, so that strangers can still check their email, even when you are using bittorrent.
But claiming that you've got "millions of new users every week" is a bald-faced lie. They don't. Depending on your assumption they may or may not have half a million new users a week, on average. But they certainly don't have "millions" and "every week".
You can't argue that something is OK because it's similar to something else that's *NOT* OK.
Unless, offcourse, you subscribe to "It's ok to be evil as long as the other guy is too", or "aslong as we can be favourably compared to McD we're ok." or "sure we're lying, but that's common in advertising, so it's ok" or some other such nonsense.
"Millions of new users every week" *is* misleading. It's simply not true. There are about 2 million *downloads* a week, but atleast half of those are likely to be existing users upgrading or installing on multiple machines.
So, it's a lie. And that's nok ok -- not even if the other guys are lying too.
Furthermore they use as almost their sole source of information a few large media-conglomerates that are also controlled by (you guessed it) big business.
It's all well and good to say that the general population should stop acting that way. Do you also have a plan for how to acomplish that ? Because for the last few decades the trend has been in the oposite direction: the people act ever more like that.
As for poor, unskilled workers being wanted for luxury -- I guess there'll always be a market for whores. That's true. But the set of luxuries are limited, especially for *unskilled* labourers. Yes, it's a luxury to have your own private chef -- but you're going to want somebody who can cook well. Yes it's a luxury to have a live band in your birthday-party, but you're going to want someone who sounds good. Yes it's a luxury to have you hair profesionally styled -- but that assumes the "professionally" part.
If we go back a 100 years this was different. There was lots of things to use *unskilled* labourers for. Watch the sheep. Cut wood. Dig a trench. Fetch water. Carry groceries from the market to the home. Feed the chickens. Harvest the potatoes.
Yes, many of these tasks are still done. But today you hire *one* skilled man with a modern expensive machine for a day, and he digs the trench that a hundred years ago was employment for 20 unskilled workers for a week.
Still, inspite of this: he employed 2 people full-time as basically servants. For him a household help and a gardener for his *vacation*home* was normal -- it was expected and reasonable.
Today, I live in luxury compared to him in just about any way, yet I employ noone, nor would I where my income to multiply by 10 tomorrow. I simply have no need for it whatsoever. Fine, there's details I'd pay for help with -- I could see getting groceries delivered. I could see having someone come by 3 hours a week to tend my garden. But that doesn't add up to anything close to 2 full-time jobs, infact it's more like 0.1 job.
Lots of the jobs that used to be done by unskilled labor are done by *machines* today. You don't need tons of people to weave cloth, saw planks, cut trees, dig trenches, or anything else like that. Yes, you need a few. But a *singe* person with a modern machine digs trenches like literally dozens of people with manual tools.
Actually both smoking and drinking correspond negatively with wealth (i.e. the poor smoke/drink more than the rich).
I actually see quite a different danger: that the poor gets increasingly irrelevant. If you go back a 100 years or so, there where poor, but there was also unskilled labor that needed to be done. One needed/wanted people to pick potatoes, harvest apples, do the dishes, wash clothes, etc.
Today, the rich (and middle-class) increasingly find they have no use for the poor whatsoever. Maximum as a "market". There's machines for doing many of the things unskilled laborers used to do. And as for servants, modern conveniences make them a lot less popular. I know, people look at me funnily because I *do* have some household-help. But fact of the matter is that central-vacuuming, machine-washing, microwave, take-away-food (good food exists too, not only pizza and chinese), etc etc etc ad nauseum has made the work of running a household significantly less than it used to be.
There are no indications whatsoever that, for example, having a wifi-hotspot 5m from your bed is more harmful than having a DECT-phone 1m away, a ligthbulb 1m away, currenct-carrying wires everywhere, drinking water, wearing cotton, cutting your toenails or looking at the Cosby show.
You, additionally, annoy me by failing to have a rudimentary grasp of the very basics of science. If you did, you'd know, for example that studies will *never* be able to conclusively show that wifi is harmless. They cannot. Not even in principle. *NO* study has conclusively shown that drinking half a liter of pure water a day is not harmful. You can *never* prove a negative.
But you're rigth, this is Slashdot, it's completely futile to expect anything else.
Some time back there was a study done in England, showing that people living near garbage-incinerators got lung-cancer 1.5 times as often as normal people. At first it was assumed this was proof the smoke from the garbage-incinerators where causing this. A more carefuly look however, reveled that: a) people living close to the incinerator where mostly poorer than average. b) poor people smoke more often than richer people. c) infact non-smokers near the incinerator had no higher risk than non-smokers elsewhere.
See the problem ?
Or another example: A statistical analysis (this one from Norway) showed that people who drink much coffee earn less money, get (on the average) less education, and have a host of other problems. Further study however showed that that's simply because the coffee-consumption in the poorest part of Norway (the north-part) is significantly higher than elsewhere.
Or a constructed example:
Assume you where to sample 1000 computers at random to test the hypothesis: attaching an lcd-screen rather than a crt to a computer improves performance. You do this by testing the performance of each of the computers, and noting which are attached to lcds. You will find that computers that have lcds are on the average atleast twice as fast as computers that do not. Now we all know that is not because the LCD helps -- it is because lcds are common on *new* computers and uncommon on *old* computers, and new computers are usually faster than old. Attaching a lcd to your old computer won't help at all. That's because speed and lcd/crt are *correlated* but the speed is not *caused* by the lcd.
Is the point starting to drift trough to you ?
To feel sure of *causation* we need to do our damnedest to exclude all other factors to the best of our ability. Even then we can never be 100% sure -- but that's not required in any case: if we find it quite likely that something is harmful, and have evidence to support this, that's quite sufficient to be careful with whatever it was until further analysis can be made.
Smoking is a good example: The increased risk of lung-cancer (and lots of other problems) for smokers by itself doesn't prove anything. However: the difference remains no matter what we try to exclude. The difference remains even if the sample has equal age, equal jobs, equal education, equal sex, equally many kids, whatever. Infact the difference remains even if we take two samples of near-identical lab-mice, treat them (as close as we can manage) to exactly the same, *except* the *one* difference: half the mice inhale tobacco-smoke, the other half doesn't.
"Apparently" ? What is that supposed to mean: Does such studies exist, or do they not ? And how can a study "indicate" a "possibility" of harm ? That is a nonsensical statement.
Listen: *everything* (literally) is "possibly" harmful. Really. You don't need any study to show that. Most studies are made to test some hypothesis. Let's say you have a hypothesis that children with wifi-homes get leukemia more often than other children. You can test this with a study. There's only three possible results:
I suggest that there exists *no* studies that show a statistically significant correlation between EM on wifi-levels and any negative health-effects. This is no proof that they're harmless: it's only lack of indication that they're harmful.
If you think otherwise, please provide pointers to those studies that say otherwise.
It'll tell you *something*. It won't tell you *everything*. Sadly, the only way to really know how a medicine (or anything else) works on humans is to test it on in a proper double-blind study using a large sample. The problem is that we don't want to risk that unless we're first reasonable sure that there aren't large problems.
Nah. You're rigth, in principle, but you're overstating it to the point where it's wrong.
First: Nothing can be "proven safe", not even in principle, much less in practice. Nobody seriously suggests banning everything. (and as others have pointed out - even that wouldn't help, because vacuum is *definitely* dangerous)
Precautions are sometimes warranted. It's a cost/benefit thing. What are the expected benefits of something, and what are the expected costs ? There are things we don't do -- because it could turn out to be very dangerous, and the benefits are small. That's not nessecarily wrong.
You just need to keep a sane balance. I think, for example, that it's quite sane to test new medicines on animals before we give them to humans -- even though they're not known to be dangerous and indeed tend to be engineered to have as few harmful effects as possible.
On the other hand, if the new medicament is the *only* (possible) cure for something with a 99% lethality, it makes no sense whatsoever to deny the medicine to those that have the disease and want to test it. (the potential downside is pretty much zero)
If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
It focuses on three issues: there's a lot less units, it's base-10, decimal is easier to work with than fractions.
These three are valid, but there's a fourth where it's even more noticeable:
It may be a pain in the butt to convert say a million inches to miles. But that's nothing compared to the pain of figuring out how many mph a 3 ton car goes after it's been pushed by a force of 1000 pounds over a time of 5 seconds (ignoring friction)
With metric it's not only doable, but trivial. If you push with a force of 1000N on a car weighing 2000Kg, it'll accelerate at 0.5m/s**2, multiply with 5 seconds and you get 2.5m/s. (if you want km/h which is more often used in daily speak, you need to divide by 3.6, that's inconvenient but it's caused by an hour having 3600 seconds, in essence hours arent base-10. It'd *be* trivial if an hour had 1000 seconds)
Furthermore, if disks continues to grow as they have the last decade, doubling in size for the same price every 18 months or so, then in 4-5 years (the "estimated" release of this) it'll have doubled another 3 times, giving you 5GB disks, this is still a factor of 200 better than that -- but there's a difference between 200 and a million....
And to top it of, this is offcourse wild speculation -- any product that is claimed to be 4-5 years away from production and has not even a working prototype is pure vapor.
Your math must be broken. Seriously.
5000 hours of saving say 50W is 250Kwh saved. Are you really saying that the price-difference between the low-energy bulb and the normal one was more than $25 dollars ? If so, I suggest you buy your bulbs elsewhere. Hell, for that price you could have them FedExed from Europe, and it'd be cheaper by far.
In short: I don't believe you.
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one. Nor where you buy yours. Like you said, it's competitive, you get good-quality bulbs for half of that today, and they typically last 5 times as long as a traditional bulb.
Still, 1 low-energy bulb tends to cost say $4 more than 5 comparable-output-and-quality traditional bulbs. It lives something like 10000 hours. Lets do maths:
- Normal bulbs: 10000h*60w = 600Kwh
- Low-energy: 10000h*12w = 120Kwh
- Saved energy: 480Kwh
- Break-even point (assuming low-energy bulbs cost $4 more upfront) 0.83 cent/kwh
I don't know what power costs where you live, but most places power costs 10 times that, delivered to the consumer. Even if your $10 was correct (which it isn't) the break-even point for this bulb would still be at 1.6cent/kwh, which is still a lot less than electricity actually costs for consumers.It gets sligthly less beneficial if you live somewhere where the extra heat is needed part of the year so it's not simply wasted. In the extreme case: you live in a electrically heated house, and the ligth is *never* on without the ovens also being on, you save nothing at all.
Pirates don't need to break the protection -- they can produce a bit-for-bit copy.
But nevertheless, pirates *will* break the protection, and then they current regime, where a copy is exactly as good as the original will be replaced by the regime of the future: where they copy is significantly *better* than the original.
This is already the case with CDs. I bougth the original of Bertine Zetlitz new CD. It wouldn't rip nicely to play in my mp3-player. It doesn't work in my laptop, nor work-computer, nor in the car-stereo.
I returned it. Bougth a pirated version on a market in Poland instead: It works perfectly and has *none* of the issues the original has.
Way to go guys ! Punish the honest customers and give the pirates *another* advantage, now they're not only cheaper: they're *BETTER* too.