More accurately, Apple's philosophy is to offer as many features (often more) than the competition, butthis is keynot to shove them all in your face at once. There's always an elegant way to access specific features and options that only reveal themselves to people who go looking for them.
Oh, how I wish that were true. Take a simple example: Suppose I want to view "hidden" files on Finder. How do I enable this? An ugly command line option and restarting all Finder applications. It is in no way elegant. How do I do this in Konqueror, my file browser of choice? View -> Show Hidden Files.
I own a Mac, and I like many aspects of it. But I often find Apple products lacking in features. I own a non-iPod (iAudio X5) because it has a number of features that are simply unavailable on iPods (OGGs, for one). The iPod would be almost perfect for my wife, but without a built-in FM tuner, it becomes a lot less elegant. For all of Apple's touted visual appeal, I find the options for changing simple things like colors to be sorely lacking. Of course, my experience is from KDE, which seems to be far and away more customizable out of the box than GNOME, Windows, and Aqua.
Still, more features tend to mean more hassle for users who want their devices to "just work". To criticize an Apple product for not being as full-featured as the competition, as I posted, missing the point. The question is whether Safari on Windows has the features that people want. We'll see. I think plenty of users dissatisfied with IE and Firefox may prefer Opera, but it seems likely that they'll hear about Safari first. After all, this beta release made the NYTimes.
Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox
That isn't surprising, because it doesn't seem like "feature-loaded" was Apple's goal (is it ever?). There's probably a market for a fast and safe(r) browser to replace IE. You might say that Opera fits this bill quite well, but Apple's marketing will mean that less technical users will hear about Apple's new Windows browser. Apple has never been about including tons of features; they've always seemed to include the most popular features and add some UI polish (which doesn't fit in very well with Windows, IMO).
That being said, I was personally a little surprised by this announcement. iTunes allows iPods and the iTMS to work on Windows, hugely expanding the available market. Quicktime means that videos can be viewed on most computers. What does Safari mean? If a website is designed to work with Firefox, it'll probably work with Safari. Do they care enough to have websites start saying, "Please upgrade to IE v. X, Firefox v. Y, or Safari v. Z to view this site properly"?
When Safari comes out of beta, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Safari + iTunes + Quicktime bundle as one (default) download when you visit Apple's site.
ah, rational pie...that's just an urban legend, you know. That was never a law, nor an attempt at law, in any US state. Check Snopes.com
If you actually read the Snopes entry, you'll see that there was, in fact, an attempt at changing the law in Indiana:
In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
Sounds like your device may not be connecting correctly. My iAudio X5 shows up the same as a USB flash drive does, and KDE asks me whether I want to mount it automatically. From there, I can use a GUI like konqueror (or, as others will mention, Amarok). Typically, though, I just use the command line.
For a while I synced podcasts with rsync in a small script which I linked from a KDE menu:
The same could easily be done for a directory of music small enough to fit on the player. If space is a concern, you could also (very carefully) use the --delete option, but I don't know if I've tested that.
Coming up with ways to improve a service like Google News is not the hard part. The hard part is implementation and, unfortunately, legal wrangling with the sites that Google aggregates. The latter probably prevents a number of easier-to-implement features because Google probably doesn't want to ruffle more feathers than they are already.
That said, let me list a few things that I'd love to see with Google News.
- Greater customization of the main page. One thing I thought of I see that GN already has - custom sections based on keywords of your choosing. Still, I can think of wanting sections which contain more broad categories or exclude certain stories. If, for example, I want to exclude any story with the words "Paris Hilton", I could have a filter set up to do that.
- Preferential treatment from news sources I like. In any given search or category, these sources would be given a bump over their previous rankings.
- Tying in with that, a general moderation system. Given enough people using the service, news stories could be moderated in a/. type system to help bring the good ones out (of course, you may want to ignore the rankings if you disagree with those reading GN)
- Barring that, Google has tons of click-through data on what people read. I'm not sure how much of that (if any) is taken into account when deciding which stories to include.
- One problem with GN moving away from beta is they haven't added ads to it yet. I've heard this is because they're afraid of backlash from the companies they're linking. I'd personally be willing to pay a small ($5/mo?) subscription fee for Google News if it can pull off the following:
- Use Google's massive bandwidth to host newswire (AP, Reuters) and major newspaper (NYTimes, LATimes, etc) articles themselves, without ads and with a clean, simple interface
- Pay a fraction of my subscription fee to those sites whose articles I read. Newspapers are struggling to find ways to generate revenue online now, as only the WSJ started with a subscription from day 1. If Google can build up enough "value-added" to start a commercial service, they might be able to break the tradition of heavy-ads news sites.
- Continue to link to sites not part of the Google network
- Offer many new customization options for paid users
The amount of mercury in CFLs is quite small. The concern is their buildup in landfills. Still, if your electricity comes from coal, the energy savings from using a CFL involves substantially less mercury than using an incandescent. In addition, the coal power plants spew pollution into the air.
As the Wikipedia page notes, this calculation changes because of two trends. Better environmental controls on coal plants make the mercury used in CFLs worse, while greater adoption of recycling makes CFLs better.
Aside from concerns about aesthetics (I don't like incandescent lighting much, but YMMV), this is really one of the last complaints about CFLs. The article was a poorly researched rant about how environmentalists are hypocrites and things which seem "green" really aren't. Sometimes that's true, but with CFLs, it's almost a no-brainer.
Take, for example, the EPA's factsheet on CFLs. It suggests that this person mentioned in TFA overreacted to the light bulb break. The instructions for cleanup are:
Safe cleanup precautions: If a CFL breaks in your home, open nearby windows to disperse any vapor that may escape, carefully sweep up the fragments (do not use your hands) and wipe the area with a disposable paper towel to remove all glass fragments. Do not use a vacuum. Place all fragments in a sealed plastic bag and follow disposal instructions above.
We're talking about 4mg of mercury here, compared with 500mg in a thermometer.
Basically, CFLs should be recycled to reap all of the environmental benefits. If you buy replacements for burned out bulbs (a rare event), just store the old bulb in the new packaging (they tend to be resealable). Wait until you have a number of them to recycle, and then do it. This isn't the first consumer item we should be treating like this: rechargeable batteries (especially lithium-ion) should be recycled as well. I have several dead laptop batteries which await eventual recycling. For that matter, items like CRT monitors have lead in them, and should also be recycled properly.
So the article is just FUD about what should be an easy choice for anyone who doesn't mind the aesthetics of CFLs.
There's very little to distinguish "internet radio" from "downloadable music", because the former can take the form of a streamed mp3 and the latter can take all sorts of forms. That doesn't keep legislation from treating the two very differently.
As I understand it (IANAL), the whole purpose behind these royalty bodies and standard licensing fees is that it allows radio stations to play music without figuring out and paying each artist/label individually. Basically, it just allows radio stations to exist without the bureaucratic nightmare that would be arranging licensing for the music it wants to play.
That said, this FAQ may provide the workaround that the summary thinks is missing:
If I join SoundExchange can I still negotiate a license with a webcaster if I want to?
Yes. Although membership in SoundExchange prohibits you from licensing your sound recording copyrights to another royalty collective for purposes of collecting and distributing Sections 112 and 114 statutory royalties on your behalf, your membership in SoundExchange does not in any way limit your ability to enter into direct (i.e., nonstatutory) licenses of any sound recordings that you own, whether with webcasters or other potential statutory licensees. SoundExchange simply requires that SRCOs notify it of any direct licenses entered into with statutory licensees or digital music service providers so that it can ensure that payments received from services that hold direct licenses to certain recordings are calculated correctly and allocated properly.
so you can't say "the royalties I'm due from this legislation about internet radio should go to this other company, not SoundExchange". If I'm reading this right (and it is getting late...), you can grant a webcaster a license outside of the system. I highly doubt that the law regarding internet radio/radio in general prohibits the artist from granting royalty-free use of their music.
The relevant portion of the law may also explicitly contain the ability to license your work under other terms. I think (C) part (vii) may be it, but I'm not inclined to dig through the language at the moment. That part reads:
(vii) phonorecords of the sound recording have been distributed to the public under the authority of the copyright owner or the copyright owner authorizes the transmitting entity to transmit the sound recording, and the transmitting entity makes the transmission from a phonorecord lawfully made under the authority of the copyright owner, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a retransmission of a broadcast transmission by a transmitting entity that does not have the right or ability to control the programming of the broadcast transmission, unless the transmitting entity is given notice in writing by the copyright owner of the sound recording that the broadcast station makes broadcast transmissions that regularly violate such requirement;
This often comes up in stories about UW-Madison. The University of Wisconsin is a big system with many campuses. UW-M refers to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. UW alone (pronounced "u double-u") refers to UW-Madison. By contrast, UW (pronounced "u dub", as I understand it) refers to the University of Washington.
People think they need color for some reason. Why I'm not exactly sure. I bought a used HP LaserJet 4 several years ago off ebay, and have used the same toner cartridge since I bought it.
I myself use a LaserJet 5MP, and I'm on my third toner cartridge (the first was used) after almost 4 years. I bought it for about $75. Each gets something like 3000-4000 pages, I think, and costs about $80 directly from HP. The print quality compared to inkjet is simply fantastic, even for an older printer which does at best 600dpi.
What amazes me, though, is that even brand new LaserJets are quite affordable. My LJ 5MP is painfully slow with some PDF documents. New B&W LaserJets start at $100, and new color LaserJets start at $300 (caveat: these include smaller toner cartridges). With personal HP LaserJets, the drum is on the cartridge, which contributes to it being relatively expensive. If you're so inclined, there are refill kits, but the drum does eventually need replacing anyway. I'm not sure what the market is like for other brands, but I'd presume that personal laser printers are more affordable everywhere.
However, the quality of the color is pretty much useless for photos. However, if you print out colored graphs/diagrams, getting those to look readable in grayscale can be difficult. Still, I was never very happy printing photos on inkjet, as it always seemed more economical to use an online service. They're down to $0.10-0.20 per 4x5 photo, with a quality that's tough to match at home with reasonable printing costs.
So if you don't need color, laser printers are cheap. If all you need is simple color, laser printers are actually still affordable. If you print photos at home, I'm not sure I'd use the same printer to print documents anyway. It is surprising how popular inkjets still are.
While I don't doubt that some British police are armed, isn't it true that a good fraction aren't? Take the Wikipedia entry, for example:
Uniforms, the issuing of firearms, type of patrol cars and other equipment varies by force. Unlike most other countries, most British Police Officers are not routinely armed on standard patrol.
If this isn't true, it should be changed. Still, WP isn't the first place I've heard that either.
They get paid with Federal Reserve Notes well before you remit any of your earnings. And they will get paid whether you remit anything or not. Because there is a printing press that will give it to them regardless.
Your tax Reserve Notes go to the Federal Reserve to prevent devaluation of the currency. And since the "money" is created out of thin air, that's really the only reason you pay taxes.
You're getting at the point in an odd way and also making a few incorrect statements. While I don't want to get bogged down with too much detail here, I think there are a couple of important points to make.
First, your use of "Federal Reserve Notes" seems odd to me. Federal Reserve Notes, technically speaking, are just the paper currency which can be redeemed (by banks) at the Federal Reserve for reserve holdings. Most would just say "dollars", or "currency", or "paper dollars". The reserves, though, do form the basis of the banking system.
Second, when you pay your taxes, your money does not go to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is somewhat separate from the rest of the government, financing its operations in large part by the return on government debt (i.e. U.S. Treasury bonds) it holds. As the FAQ states, any returns above that are paid to the U.S. Treasury.
The U.S. Treasury is the department that really handles the budget and taxes. If you pay your taxes by check, note that you make out that check to the "U.S. Treasury". When the U.S. government spends more than it receives, it issues debt in the form of Treasury bonds. The U.S. Treasury makes decisions about printing new money (aka seigniorage). The Fed's control over the money supply is through the fractional reserve banking system, which I'm not going to focus on here.
Going back to paying your taxes, it's more accurate to think of them as keeping the government from having to borrow that money with bonds. Many of those bonds are held by people and firms in the U.S., so we essentially owe money to ourselves. In addition, many of the bonds are purchased with Social Security taxes which, at least for now, exceed Social Security payments.
In some governments, it's true that if the government can't raise the revenue it wants to spend it will end up printing large amounts of money. We know that tends to lead to hyperinflation, as is the case with Zimbabwe right now. However, the U.S. is considered such a safe borrower that bonds have a fairly low rate of return on them, yet people are still willing to buy them. It's through these bonds that we have almost $9 trillion in national debt. So for the most part the U.S. borrows to spend more, not prints to spend more.
If your claims about printing money and seigniorage were true, then we'd be having incredible inflation, since we've been spending way more than we've been taxing in the last 50 years on average.
I'm saying that it's justified by the fact that he was being questioned by a grand jury, which denies you your constitutional right to protection from self-incrimination. Not that our constitution ever meant that much, being just a piece of paper, but there seem to be exceptions to every "right" that the constitution supposedly guarantees us.
Wikipedia, being the first place I checked, disagrees with you: "In all U.S. jurisdictions retaining the grand jury, the defendant has the right under the Fifth Amendment not to give self-incriminating testimony. However, the prosecutor can call the defendant to testify and require the defendant to assert the right on a question-by-question basis, which is prohibited in jury trials unless the defendant has voluntarily testified on his own behalf. Other evidentiary rules applicable to trials (such as the hearsay rule) are generally not applicable to grand jury proceedings."
Thus, you can be forced to sit on the stand, giving the same 5th amendment claim over and over. FindLaw gives the case that apparently set precedent.
I worked 25-35 hours a week when I was 16 and 17, and out of a $400 bi-weekly check I paid at least $50-$100 in Social Security tax. Come tax day, I got $100 back both years. Bullshit you get it back, the government stole my money.
I find that highly implausible. Both Medicare and Social Security tax combined are about 8% of your income (it's called FICA. Thus you paid perhaps $35-40 per paycheck in SS + Medicare, but not more. If you were self-employed, you pay both the employer contribution and the employee contribution to pay about 15%, which is $60 of a $400 paycheck. You don't sound like you were self-employed.
What's interesting is that full-time university students are exempt from FICA, while high school students are not. So in undergrad I paid FICA during the summer but not when I was enrolled with full-time status.
Unless you are actually needing to see more things at the same time, extra monitors are a waste of desk space and electricity. Get some virtual desktops set up and connect them to your function keys (or alt-function keys).
This is what I do. It's the first thing I set up on a new KDE install: 11 virtual desktops, mapped to alt-1 through alt-0, alt-` (by far the most convenient keybindings I've seen). Between my laptop and my desktop I keep my applications consistent. Desktop 1 is a terminal, desktop 2 is a web browser, desktop 3 is mail, desktop 4 is LaTeX (I do quite a bit of writing these days).
Still, at home I have dual 17" monitors. Why? Because it's a huge convenience to write LaTeX on one screen, and see the DVI in another. It's also convenient to have a web browser on one screen, and IM/notes/random small apps on another. The same goes for development (edit MATLAB in one screen, see the output in another). On my laptop I have to assign different virtual desktops to do some of these, leading to much more alt-switching even within the context of one task.
Unfortunately, the way dual monitors work in xorg, my virtual desktops are one extra-wide desktop spanning both monitors. I would love to be able to assign any combination of 1280x1024 virtual desktops to each physical monitor. That is, maybe I want a web browser and a console at the same time, or later a web browser and mail. The applications could remain on their virtual desktop, I'm just choosing to view different virtual desktops for each monitor.
I'm a bit scared as to what this will mean for RIAA attacks against innocent people accused of file sharing. If "self help" is available for the university when someone hacked their server, why WOULDN'T the courts allow "investigators" working for the MAFIAA to hack into computers to determine if they were "pirating" music or movies?
Well, one reason is that apparently this guy was connected to the university's network. He was using it to actively hack other systems, which is more clearly an "emergency" than copyright infringement (IANAL).
However, given that basically all major ISPs have user agreements such that you may not use their network for copyright infringement, they may be able to write in language that gives them the ability to not only shut down your network access but "counterhack" you at the behest of the RIAA.
Still, it's not clear that this would make their cases stronger. There might be some desire to actually have poked around in an alleged infringer's computer before they get a chance to wipe it clean, and it might reduce instances of "but someone was sharing my IP through my open wireless access point". Even so, it sounds like more trouble than it's worth, even for the RIAA.
I recalled the lengthy explanation backwards: the movie implicitly has the "B5-style" time travel (i.e. no original history existed where people didn't travel back in time, it is all predestined). This guy makes a convoluted argument of how it could work with "traditional" time travel, where an original, unmolested history goes forward, and people from the future come back and mess it up. With 7 altered timelines, though, I'm not a big fan of this explanation, and it certainly doesn't seem like what the writers were going for.
Yes, yes, yes. I was going to post the same, but you beat me to it. 12 Monkeys is an excellent film and should surely count as sci-fi in this context. It is both entertaining and though-provoking, and extremely well-made. In fact, one of my favorite movies of all time (as you can probably see). A shame, then, that it didn't appear on this list.
Then perhaps you can explain how Railly recognizes Cole, and especially remembers him in his disguise from the airport. After I watched the movie I tried to trace out the time travelling (and the logic used by the movie in how time travel actually works, since it can vary), and I simply can't explain it. Online searches brought up nothing except for one exceedingly complicated story about having the time travel actually work B5 style: that is, there is no "original" history which you go back to change, that all time-travel to the past is in fact predestined. Still, as I recall, there wasn't a good explanation (or really mention) of why Railly recognizes Cole.
Otherwise, the movie was surprisingly internally consistent for a time travel film. They made such a big deal about Railly recognizing Cole (in disguise), though, which kinda ruined it for me. If there isn't a good explanation, it seems like the sort of thing you could leave out. They had the picture from the French army, but he wasn't in disguise there.
The rise of feminism and the idea that you weren't a real woman unless you had a career, essentially doubled the size of the work force in a generation.
Except that's not what happened Check out page 4. The labor force participation rate declined for men about 10% while for women it rose a little over 20%. The total, however, has gone up less than 10%, which represents an increase of only 20%, not doubling.
Umm, no. You need to take nominal gas prices and adjust them for overall inflation. If you do that, you end up with a graph like this or like this.
While we got somewhat close post-Katrina and in parts of 2006, we still haven't surpassed the average prices of the early 1980s (following the 1979 "oil shock"). You have to be a bit careful, as really big spikes which last a matter of days are averaged out in the data, so you shouldn't directly compare the highest number recorded on a given day with historical averages.
In addition, cars are more fuel efficient at the same size now than in the early 1980s. However, people seem to just crave bigger vehicles now than in the 1980s, in part because they can afford them with the second income you mention. But that doesn't mean that a family couldn't maintain a reasonable standard of living on one income; it just means that instead of driving a huge SUV, they drive a compact car to work and the grocery store. It's absurd to claim that a second income is "ABSOLUTELY" necessary, when in fact many families are single parent (and thus single income).
As others are pointing out, people are buying bigger houses. Each kid has their own bedroom, more bathrooms/person, etc. The point is that this second income helps sustain greater consumption, but that previously accepted standards of living are still affordable on one income.
Holy smokes, I never knew that particular incident about Amazon.com.. did it ever make the big news? I'm thinking that something like this should've caused so much consumer anguish / mistrust / lost confidence in Amazon that they would have had lost a lot of business.
Where was the consumer uproar??
A quick Google search turned up this Slashdot article. I didn't realize it was almost 7 years old, though. I read about it here, and amongst people who heard about it, there was definitely some uproar.
Honestly, I think it's not a management plan to rip people off, they just like to keep the internet best buy and store best buy separate so when a rep logs onto the computer you see your store's price... and reps' ignorance ends up screwing people over.
There has to be a better, faster interface for finding in-store prices than an exact mock-up of the bestbuy.com website. Not to mention that an intranet site could have more useful info like items in stock, when more are expected in that store, what section/aisle of the store it's located in (or whatever).
Best Buy has a modest contract with Accenture (old Author Anderson) helping them re-design their IT. Coincidence?
Accenture was formerly Andersen Consulting, which split from Arthur Andersen in 1989, and it apparently wasn't exactly a friendly split. To my knowledge, most of the accounting problems regarding Enron and Arthur Andersen happened in the 1990s.
Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online, but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy, where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.
Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably don't).
This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought it just went away because of the PR nightmare.
It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or "senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, how I wish that were true. Take a simple example: Suppose I want to view "hidden" files on Finder. How do I enable this? An ugly command line option and restarting all Finder applications. It is in no way elegant. How do I do this in Konqueror, my file browser of choice? View -> Show Hidden Files.
I own a Mac, and I like many aspects of it. But I often find Apple products lacking in features. I own a non-iPod (iAudio X5) because it has a number of features that are simply unavailable on iPods (OGGs, for one). The iPod would be almost perfect for my wife, but without a built-in FM tuner, it becomes a lot less elegant. For all of Apple's touted visual appeal, I find the options for changing simple things like colors to be sorely lacking. Of course, my experience is from KDE, which seems to be far and away more customizable out of the box than GNOME, Windows, and Aqua.
Still, more features tend to mean more hassle for users who want their devices to "just work". To criticize an Apple product for not being as full-featured as the competition, as I posted, missing the point. The question is whether Safari on Windows has the features that people want. We'll see. I think plenty of users dissatisfied with IE and Firefox may prefer Opera, but it seems likely that they'll hear about Safari first. After all, this beta release made the NYTimes.
That isn't surprising, because it doesn't seem like "feature-loaded" was Apple's goal (is it ever?). There's probably a market for a fast and safe(r) browser to replace IE. You might say that Opera fits this bill quite well, but Apple's marketing will mean that less technical users will hear about Apple's new Windows browser. Apple has never been about including tons of features; they've always seemed to include the most popular features and add some UI polish (which doesn't fit in very well with Windows, IMO).
That being said, I was personally a little surprised by this announcement. iTunes allows iPods and the iTMS to work on Windows, hugely expanding the available market. Quicktime means that videos can be viewed on most computers. What does Safari mean? If a website is designed to work with Firefox, it'll probably work with Safari. Do they care enough to have websites start saying, "Please upgrade to IE v. X, Firefox v. Y, or Safari v. Z to view this site properly"?
When Safari comes out of beta, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Safari + iTunes + Quicktime bundle as one (default) download when you visit Apple's site.
If you actually read the Snopes entry, you'll see that there was, in fact, an attempt at changing the law in Indiana:
Whoops: s/TARGET/DEST/
Sounds like your device may not be connecting correctly. My iAudio X5 shows up the same as a USB flash drive does, and KDE asks me whether I want to mount it automatically. From there, I can use a GUI like konqueror (or, as others will mention, Amarok). Typically, though, I just use the command line.
For a while I synced podcasts with rsync in a small script which I linked from a KDE menu:
SOURCE=/path/to/podcasts/
DEST=/path/to/player/podcasts/
rsync -av $SOURCE $TARGET
The same could easily be done for a directory of music small enough to fit on the player. If space is a concern, you could also (very carefully) use the --delete option, but I don't know if I've tested that.
Coming up with ways to improve a service like Google News is not the hard part. The hard part is implementation and, unfortunately, legal wrangling with the sites that Google aggregates. The latter probably prevents a number of easier-to-implement features because Google probably doesn't want to ruffle more feathers than they are already.
/. type system to help bring the good ones out (of course, you may want to ignore the rankings if you disagree with those reading GN)
That said, let me list a few things that I'd love to see with Google News.
- Greater customization of the main page. One thing I thought of I see that GN already has - custom sections based on keywords of your choosing. Still, I can think of wanting sections which contain more broad categories or exclude certain stories. If, for example, I want to exclude any story with the words "Paris Hilton", I could have a filter set up to do that.
- Preferential treatment from news sources I like. In any given search or category, these sources would be given a bump over their previous rankings.
- Tying in with that, a general moderation system. Given enough people using the service, news stories could be moderated in a
- Barring that, Google has tons of click-through data on what people read. I'm not sure how much of that (if any) is taken into account when deciding which stories to include.
- One problem with GN moving away from beta is they haven't added ads to it yet. I've heard this is because they're afraid of backlash from the companies they're linking. I'd personally be willing to pay a small ($5/mo?) subscription fee for Google News if it can pull off the following:
- Use Google's massive bandwidth to host newswire (AP, Reuters) and major newspaper (NYTimes, LATimes, etc) articles themselves, without ads and with a clean, simple interface
- Pay a fraction of my subscription fee to those sites whose articles I read. Newspapers are struggling to find ways to generate revenue online now, as only the WSJ started with a subscription from day 1. If Google can build up enough "value-added" to start a commercial service, they might be able to break the tradition of heavy-ads news sites.
- Continue to link to sites not part of the Google network
- Offer many new customization options for paid users
As the Wikipedia page notes, this calculation changes because of two trends. Better environmental controls on coal plants make the mercury used in CFLs worse, while greater adoption of recycling makes CFLs better.
Aside from concerns about aesthetics (I don't like incandescent lighting much, but YMMV), this is really one of the last complaints about CFLs. The article was a poorly researched rant about how environmentalists are hypocrites and things which seem "green" really aren't. Sometimes that's true, but with CFLs, it's almost a no-brainer.
Take, for example, the EPA's factsheet on CFLs. It suggests that this person mentioned in TFA overreacted to the light bulb break. The instructions for cleanup are:
We're talking about 4mg of mercury here, compared with 500mg in a thermometer.
Basically, CFLs should be recycled to reap all of the environmental benefits. If you buy replacements for burned out bulbs (a rare event), just store the old bulb in the new packaging (they tend to be resealable). Wait until you have a number of them to recycle, and then do it. This isn't the first consumer item we should be treating like this: rechargeable batteries (especially lithium-ion) should be recycled as well. I have several dead laptop batteries which await eventual recycling. For that matter, items like CRT monitors have lead in them, and should also be recycled properly.
So the article is just FUD about what should be an easy choice for anyone who doesn't mind the aesthetics of CFLs.
As I understand it (IANAL), the whole purpose behind these royalty bodies and standard licensing fees is that it allows radio stations to play music without figuring out and paying each artist/label individually. Basically, it just allows radio stations to exist without the bureaucratic nightmare that would be arranging licensing for the music it wants to play.
That said, this FAQ may provide the workaround that the summary thinks is missing:
so you can't say "the royalties I'm due from this legislation about internet radio should go to this other company, not SoundExchange". If I'm reading this right (and it is getting late...), you can grant a webcaster a license outside of the system. I highly doubt that the law regarding internet radio/radio in general prohibits the artist from granting royalty-free use of their music.
The relevant portion of the law may also explicitly contain the ability to license your work under other terms. I think (C) part (vii) may be it, but I'm not inclined to dig through the language at the moment. That part reads:
but the context of this clause isn't clear to me.
This often comes up in stories about UW-Madison. The University of Wisconsin is a big system with many campuses. UW-M refers to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. UW alone (pronounced "u double-u") refers to UW-Madison. By contrast, UW (pronounced "u dub", as I understand it) refers to the University of Washington.
I myself use a LaserJet 5MP, and I'm on my third toner cartridge (the first was used) after almost 4 years. I bought it for about $75. Each gets something like 3000-4000 pages, I think, and costs about $80 directly from HP. The print quality compared to inkjet is simply fantastic, even for an older printer which does at best 600dpi.
What amazes me, though, is that even brand new LaserJets are quite affordable. My LJ 5MP is painfully slow with some PDF documents. New B&W LaserJets start at $100, and new color LaserJets start at $300 (caveat: these include smaller toner cartridges). With personal HP LaserJets, the drum is on the cartridge, which contributes to it being relatively expensive. If you're so inclined, there are refill kits, but the drum does eventually need replacing anyway. I'm not sure what the market is like for other brands, but I'd presume that personal laser printers are more affordable everywhere.
However, the quality of the color is pretty much useless for photos. However, if you print out colored graphs/diagrams, getting those to look readable in grayscale can be difficult. Still, I was never very happy printing photos on inkjet, as it always seemed more economical to use an online service. They're down to $0.10-0.20 per 4x5 photo, with a quality that's tough to match at home with reasonable printing costs.
So if you don't need color, laser printers are cheap. If all you need is simple color, laser printers are actually still affordable. If you print photos at home, I'm not sure I'd use the same printer to print documents anyway. It is surprising how popular inkjets still are.
If this isn't true, it should be changed. Still, WP isn't the first place I've heard that either.
You're getting at the point in an odd way and also making a few incorrect statements. While I don't want to get bogged down with too much detail here, I think there are a couple of important points to make.
First, your use of "Federal Reserve Notes" seems odd to me. Federal Reserve Notes, technically speaking, are just the paper currency which can be redeemed (by banks) at the Federal Reserve for reserve holdings. Most would just say "dollars", or "currency", or "paper dollars". The reserves, though, do form the basis of the banking system.
Second, when you pay your taxes, your money does not go to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is somewhat separate from the rest of the government, financing its operations in large part by the return on government debt (i.e. U.S. Treasury bonds) it holds. As the FAQ states, any returns above that are paid to the U.S. Treasury.
The U.S. Treasury is the department that really handles the budget and taxes. If you pay your taxes by check, note that you make out that check to the "U.S. Treasury". When the U.S. government spends more than it receives, it issues debt in the form of Treasury bonds. The U.S. Treasury makes decisions about printing new money (aka seigniorage). The Fed's control over the money supply is through the fractional reserve banking system, which I'm not going to focus on here.
Going back to paying your taxes, it's more accurate to think of them as keeping the government from having to borrow that money with bonds. Many of those bonds are held by people and firms in the U.S., so we essentially owe money to ourselves. In addition, many of the bonds are purchased with Social Security taxes which, at least for now, exceed Social Security payments.
In some governments, it's true that if the government can't raise the revenue it wants to spend it will end up printing large amounts of money. We know that tends to lead to hyperinflation, as is the case with Zimbabwe right now. However, the U.S. is considered such a safe borrower that bonds have a fairly low rate of return on them, yet people are still willing to buy them. It's through these bonds that we have almost $9 trillion in national debt. So for the most part the U.S. borrows to spend more, not prints to spend more.
If your claims about printing money and seigniorage were true, then we'd be having incredible inflation, since we've been spending way more than we've been taxing in the last 50 years on average.
"In all U.S. jurisdictions retaining the grand jury, the defendant has the right under the Fifth Amendment not to give self-incriminating testimony. However, the prosecutor can call the defendant to testify and require the defendant to assert the right on a question-by-question basis, which is prohibited in jury trials unless the defendant has voluntarily testified on his own behalf. Other evidentiary rules applicable to trials (such as the hearsay rule) are generally not applicable to grand jury proceedings."
Thus, you can be forced to sit on the stand, giving the same 5th amendment claim over and over. FindLaw gives the case that apparently set precedent.
IANAL.
I find that highly implausible. Both Medicare and Social Security tax combined are about 8% of your income (it's called FICA. Thus you paid perhaps $35-40 per paycheck in SS + Medicare, but not more. If you were self-employed, you pay both the employer contribution and the employee contribution to pay about 15%, which is $60 of a $400 paycheck. You don't sound like you were self-employed.
What's interesting is that full-time university students are exempt from FICA, while high school students are not. So in undergrad I paid FICA during the summer but not when I was enrolled with full-time status.
This is what I do. It's the first thing I set up on a new KDE install: 11 virtual desktops, mapped to alt-1 through alt-0, alt-` (by far the most convenient keybindings I've seen). Between my laptop and my desktop I keep my applications consistent. Desktop 1 is a terminal, desktop 2 is a web browser, desktop 3 is mail, desktop 4 is LaTeX (I do quite a bit of writing these days).
Still, at home I have dual 17" monitors. Why? Because it's a huge convenience to write LaTeX on one screen, and see the DVI in another. It's also convenient to have a web browser on one screen, and IM/notes/random small apps on another. The same goes for development (edit MATLAB in one screen, see the output in another). On my laptop I have to assign different virtual desktops to do some of these, leading to much more alt-switching even within the context of one task.
Unfortunately, the way dual monitors work in xorg, my virtual desktops are one extra-wide desktop spanning both monitors. I would love to be able to assign any combination of 1280x1024 virtual desktops to each physical monitor. That is, maybe I want a web browser and a console at the same time, or later a web browser and mail. The applications could remain on their virtual desktop, I'm just choosing to view different virtual desktops for each monitor.
Well, one reason is that apparently this guy was connected to the university's network. He was using it to actively hack other systems, which is more clearly an "emergency" than copyright infringement (IANAL).
However, given that basically all major ISPs have user agreements such that you may not use their network for copyright infringement, they may be able to write in language that gives them the ability to not only shut down your network access but "counterhack" you at the behest of the RIAA.
Still, it's not clear that this would make their cases stronger. There might be some desire to actually have poked around in an alleged infringer's computer before they get a chance to wipe it clean, and it might reduce instances of "but someone was sharing my IP through my open wireless access point". Even so, it sounds like more trouble than it's worth, even for the RIAA.
First paragraph of TFA says that it was 357.2 mph, not 350. So it's less than 4 mph slower than the maglev record.
I recalled the lengthy explanation backwards: the movie implicitly has the "B5-style" time travel (i.e. no original history existed where people didn't travel back in time, it is all predestined). This guy makes a convoluted argument of how it could work with "traditional" time travel, where an original, unmolested history goes forward, and people from the future come back and mess it up. With 7 altered timelines, though, I'm not a big fan of this explanation, and it certainly doesn't seem like what the writers were going for.
Then perhaps you can explain how Railly recognizes Cole, and especially remembers him in his disguise from the airport. After I watched the movie I tried to trace out the time travelling (and the logic used by the movie in how time travel actually works, since it can vary), and I simply can't explain it. Online searches brought up nothing except for one exceedingly complicated story about having the time travel actually work B5 style: that is, there is no "original" history which you go back to change, that all time-travel to the past is in fact predestined. Still, as I recall, there wasn't a good explanation (or really mention) of why Railly recognizes Cole.
Otherwise, the movie was surprisingly internally consistent for a time travel film. They made such a big deal about Railly recognizing Cole (in disguise), though, which kinda ruined it for me. If there isn't a good explanation, it seems like the sort of thing you could leave out. They had the picture from the French army, but he wasn't in disguise there.
Except that's not what happened Check out page 4. The labor force participation rate declined for men about 10% while for women it rose a little over 20%. The total, however, has gone up less than 10%, which represents an increase of only 20%, not doubling.
Umm, no. You need to take nominal gas prices and adjust them for overall inflation. If you do that, you end up with a graph like this or like this.
While we got somewhat close post-Katrina and in parts of 2006, we still haven't surpassed the average prices of the early 1980s (following the 1979 "oil shock"). You have to be a bit careful, as really big spikes which last a matter of days are averaged out in the data, so you shouldn't directly compare the highest number recorded on a given day with historical averages.
In addition, cars are more fuel efficient at the same size now than in the early 1980s. However, people seem to just crave bigger vehicles now than in the 1980s, in part because they can afford them with the second income you mention. But that doesn't mean that a family couldn't maintain a reasonable standard of living on one income; it just means that instead of driving a huge SUV, they drive a compact car to work and the grocery store. It's absurd to claim that a second income is "ABSOLUTELY" necessary, when in fact many families are single parent (and thus single income).
As others are pointing out, people are buying bigger houses. Each kid has their own bedroom, more bathrooms/person, etc. The point is that this second income helps sustain greater consumption, but that previously accepted standards of living are still affordable on one income.
A quick Google search turned up this Slashdot article. I didn't realize it was almost 7 years old, though. I read about it here, and amongst people who heard about it, there was definitely some uproar.
There has to be a better, faster interface for finding in-store prices than an exact mock-up of the bestbuy.com website. Not to mention that an intranet site could have more useful info like items in stock, when more are expected in that store, what section/aisle of the store it's located in (or whatever).
Accenture was formerly Andersen Consulting, which split from Arthur Andersen in 1989, and it apparently wasn't exactly a friendly split. To my knowledge, most of the accounting problems regarding Enron and Arthur Andersen happened in the 1990s.
Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online, but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy, where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.
Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably don't).
This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought it just went away because of the PR nightmare.
It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or "senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.