You're neglecting the fact that most people, in general, do not have the money to hire a team of lawyers required to pursue a defense against the RIAA much less counter sue. Money is the 800lb. gorilla that the RIAA is using to their advantage in these cases, they have lots of it and the accused don't.
So guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the outcome for most, they'll pay the fine because it's cheaper and the RIAA will rack up another notch in it's legal belt.
By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.
Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.
Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.
I predict that lazy people will become even lazier when they no longer have to even move their finger to change the channel on the TV.
Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA will fight to have your brain DRM'd so that you can't even think about their products without paying the licensing fees.
Brain hacking will be the next big teenage geek sport with Sobig2010 causing major epileptic fits around the world.
All pretenses of religion will be dropped for the truely important holy crusade of MacHeads vs Penguinistas vs MSsheep. Who will own the source code to your brain?
The main problem in that equation is simply scale. Current flywheel production is nothing near lead acid battery production. If the utilities or the government were to offer incentives to have homeowners and businesses invest in these devices then the increased demand would drive the prices into something more reasonable as well as spur innovation in the industry.
When comparing batteries to flywheels you also have to consider that batteries have a limited number of times they can be charged which means frequent replacement. Flywheel maintenance essentially boils down to replacing the bearings every year or so.
Flywheel storage density is limited only by its rotational speed and is not affected by variables of temperature like batteries.
Why not provide every homeowner/business with a flywheel UPS. The flywheel could charge itself during off peak hours and provide the homeowner's peak energy needs without drawing excessively from the grid.
In the event of a grid failure, the house would draw power from the flywheel until the grid could come back up. The flywheel could also be used to regulate the power entering the house eliminating surges and brownouts.
Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.
My god, what a devistating counter argument. I bow to such a word-smith as you sir. Indeed, the wool has been removed from my eyes and I see clearly now.
"The Constitution is a collection of words, meant to be reinterpreted over time to suit the needs of the people now, not as we were 200 years ago."
Exactly where in that sentence do the words "the Constitution doesn't mean anything today"? I never said that, and never implied it.
What I said, is that the Constitution is open to interpretation. That is why we have the Supreme Court, to decide on what the Constitution means to us today. Just like they decided that since the Constitution says 'limited times' in connection with copyrights, Congress can lengthen copyrights for any term they wish but can't come out and actually say it's permanent. "Infinity -1" so to speak.
Many people read the 2nd Amendment and see the little section that says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" and deam that to mean that anyone, under any circumstances, can own entire arsenals of machine guns. Other people notice the other part of the sentence that says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state" and feel that you have to be in a militia to own a gun, and that said militia is to be heavily regulated by the state. It's a contradictory sentence open to wildy opposing interpretations, but that's somewhat the point.
It, and the rest of the Constitution is not written in stone. They are guidlines meant to be challenged, redefined, honed to meet the needs of the people at any given moment. It's a fluid document, not the ten commandments.
On one side you make a good point. Criminals will always have access to illegal weapons. That's a given. Death penalty laws don't keep people from killing each other either, should we get rid of those? Heck, jails don't stop criminals much, so let's tear those down too.
While we're at it, we can each huddle up our families into well armed little encampments, put out armed guards (trusted relatives only, and then only trust them as far as you can throw them) and we'll all just stare at each other while caressing all our nice shiny guns. Yeah, thats civilization.
Frankly, there are numerous people who would never consider commiting a crime who simply should not have access to a firearm.
If we dictate who can own and operate a car, under what conditions they can operate it and require them to pass a test demonstrating some aptitude with it, why is it such a leap to require similar checks on ownership of something designed to kill?
Crying that it's in the Constitution doesn't mean jack either. The Constitution is a collection of words, meant to be reinterpreted over time to suit the needs of the people now, not as we were 200 years ago.
I said that motherboards were starting to become more like notebook motherboards. While there continues to be a market for full ATX boards, it's slowly eroding to the all-in-one board market.
Consider the MicroATX and the Via EPIA motherboards. A number of MicroATX boards are starting to drop the AGP slot because the board has video on it. Or they sacrifice a PCI slot for a CNR/AMR slot.
As for how many slots I need, let's see, I just built a pc today that has a scsi card, modem, network adapter and a sound card. That's 4 PCI slots. Later he might want to add firewire or serial ATA.
In my experience, I've had 6 or 7 motherboards with on-board sound and all of them developed problems over time that required me to disable them and add a PCI sound card.
To me, the trend to condense all the peripherals onto the motherboard means that eventually everything will be like the notebooks. Integrated, oem supplier only parts that are totally non-upgradeable and useless if one component fails.
Give me the freedom of PCI slots and add-on cards anyday.
Yes, you're absolutely right. A screenshot is irrefutable evidence of the basic structure of an operating system.
Indeed, untill I had seen a screenshot or two, I had no idea how to write in C, now I'm rewriting Linux from a monolithic kernel to a micro kernel, thanks to the power of screenshots!
Lessee, McAffee will render in Mozilla, but you have to have have an ActiveX plugin to use their online update service. What? No ActiveX plugins for Mozilla/Opera? I'm shocked! There's a plugin for ActiveX in development, but it took a long time for someone to start up the project.
Speaking of plugins, the vast majority are written for Windows only, which again ties web development to the Microsoft platform.
Why is it competition? it's not like you have to buy either of the browsers.
It's competition because of the vast number of websites that are coded specifically for IE and are incapable of rendering properly in other browsers.
If you want a "good" internet experience, then you have to use IE, to use IE you have to buy Windows (since they're killing off the stand-alone IE). This ties more developers into the loop of coding to the dominant browser (IE) rather than the standards, which ties them into more MS oriented development tools.
In a market with actual competition that would work. Unfortunately Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, which puts it out of the supply/demand argument as they supply what they want, to whom they want, under whatever terms they want, to the detriment of an open market.
Most second tier Office products (WordPerfect, OOo, etc.) worry more about being able to produce MS Office documents than each others simply because they're trying to woo MS Office users. You're not going to significantly increase your OOo userbase touting its KOffice interoperability.
See, there's a difference between people who like to tinker with their computers, installing ghostscript, cygwin and the like in order to output a PDF file in "12 Easy Steps!" and the people who have more important things to do so they love a simple "Print to PDF" option.
Also, (I believe), Suse is still a part of United Linux which I do not want to support.
Just because SCO has turned into a bunch of wankers doesn't mean you should punish SuSE or Conectiva by association. The reason they formed UL was to share a common code base (mostly SuSE's, btw) with each distributer adding their own bells and whistles. UL is still a good idea.
As far as the SuSELiveCD's, I've never had any trouble with them. Perhaps you had an error during the download of the ISO the caused your CD to get burnt wonky.
As for SuSE 8.1, it's been excellent and I use it daily at home and work. I'll be snatching a copy of 8.2 as soon as it's released.
Yeah, it's all free software, and you could easily go out and compile all the stuff from code and integrate them together on your own. So why don't you, instead of waiting for SuSE or Redhat to do it for you? Oh, right, cause configuring all that crap by hand sucks balls.
Tell me this too, why does Redhat differentiate between RH8.0 and RH Enterprise Linux? Plus they have six different price levels for the Enterprise Linux package.
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So guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the outcome for most, they'll pay the fine because it's cheaper and the RIAA will rack up another notch in it's legal belt.
Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.
Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.
I predict that lazy people will become even lazier when they no longer have to even move their finger to change the channel on the TV.
Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA will fight to have your brain DRM'd so that you can't even think about their products without paying the licensing fees.
Brain hacking will be the next big teenage geek sport with Sobig2010 causing major epileptic fits around the world.
All pretenses of religion will be dropped for the truely important holy crusade of MacHeads vs Penguinistas vs MSsheep. Who will own the source code to your brain?
I beg to differ. Many Outlook viri are embedded into HTML messages that require no user action to run.
The main problem in that equation is simply scale. Current flywheel production is nothing near lead acid battery production. If the utilities or the government were to offer incentives to have homeowners and businesses invest in these devices then the increased demand would drive the prices into something more reasonable as well as spur innovation in the industry.
When comparing batteries to flywheels you also have to consider that batteries have a limited number of times they can be charged which means frequent replacement. Flywheel maintenance essentially boils down to replacing the bearings every year or so.
Flywheel storage density is limited only by its rotational speed and is not affected by variables of temperature like batteries.
An A/C sized unit could easily be burried in the yard, perhaps even placed inside a concrete containment.
In the event of a grid failure, the house would draw power from the flywheel until the grid could come back up. The flywheel could also be used to regulate the power entering the house eliminating surges and brownouts.
Flywheels are more environmentaly friendly than a bank of batteries and less hazardous than storing volatile gasses.
Hrmm, you won't buy a Linux PDA because the GUI is proprietary although the underlying os is GPL, but you'll use a Palm PDA which is 100% proprietary.
How free(speech) does it have to be before you'll support it, exactly?
Hrmmm, consider the environmental impact of a billion or so diamond CPUs running night and day dumping heat into the atmosphere.
:)
Global warming indeed.
My god, what a devistating counter argument. I bow to such a word-smith as you sir. Indeed, the wool has been removed from my eyes and I see clearly now.
"The Constitution is a collection of words, meant to be reinterpreted over time to suit the needs of the people now, not as we were 200 years ago."
Exactly where in that sentence do the words "the Constitution doesn't mean anything today"? I never said that, and never implied it.
What I said, is that the Constitution is open to interpretation. That is why we have the Supreme Court, to decide on what the Constitution means to us today. Just like they decided that since the Constitution says 'limited times' in connection with copyrights, Congress can lengthen copyrights for any term they wish but can't come out and actually say it's permanent. "Infinity -1" so to speak.
Many people read the 2nd Amendment and see the little section that says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" and deam that to mean that anyone, under any circumstances, can own entire arsenals of machine guns. Other people notice the other part of the sentence that says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state" and feel that you have to be in a militia to own a gun, and that said militia is to be heavily regulated by the state. It's a contradictory sentence open to wildy opposing interpretations, but that's somewhat the point.
It, and the rest of the Constitution is not written in stone. They are guidlines meant to be challenged, redefined, honed to meet the needs of the people at any given moment. It's a fluid document, not the ten commandments.
On one side you make a good point. Criminals will always have access to illegal weapons. That's a given. Death penalty laws don't keep people from killing each other either, should we get rid of those? Heck, jails don't stop criminals much, so let's tear those down too.
While we're at it, we can each huddle up our families into well armed little encampments, put out armed guards (trusted relatives only, and then only trust them as far as you can throw them) and we'll all just stare at each other while caressing all our nice shiny guns. Yeah, thats civilization.
Frankly, there are numerous people who would never consider commiting a crime who simply should not have access to a firearm.
If we dictate who can own and operate a car, under what conditions they can operate it and require them to pass a test demonstrating some aptitude with it, why is it such a leap to require similar checks on ownership of something designed to kill?
Crying that it's in the Constitution doesn't mean jack either. The Constitution is a collection of words, meant to be reinterpreted over time to suit the needs of the people now, not as we were 200 years ago.
I said that motherboards were starting to become more like notebook motherboards. While there continues to be a market for full ATX boards, it's slowly eroding to the all-in-one board market.
Consider the MicroATX and the Via EPIA motherboards. A number of MicroATX boards are starting to drop the AGP slot because the board has video on it. Or they sacrifice a PCI slot for a CNR/AMR slot.
As for how many slots I need, let's see, I just built a pc today that has a scsi card, modem, network adapter and a sound card. That's 4 PCI slots. Later he might want to add firewire or serial ATA.
In my experience, I've had 6 or 7 motherboards with on-board sound and all of them developed problems over time that required me to disable them and add a PCI sound card.
To me, the trend to condense all the peripherals onto the motherboard means that eventually everything will be like the notebooks. Integrated, oem supplier only parts that are totally non-upgradeable and useless if one component fails.
Give me the freedom of PCI slots and add-on cards anyday.
A much quieter and simpler solution would be a SliMP3 player in each location with a suitable amp.
Yes, you're absolutely right. A screenshot is irrefutable evidence of the basic structure of an operating system.
Indeed, untill I had seen a screenshot or two, I had no idea how to write in C, now I'm rewriting Linux from a monolithic kernel to a micro kernel, thanks to the power of screenshots!
Lessee, McAffee will render in Mozilla, but you have to have have an ActiveX plugin to use their online update service. What? No ActiveX plugins for Mozilla/Opera? I'm shocked! There's a plugin for ActiveX in development, but it took a long time for someone to start up the project.
Speaking of plugins, the vast majority are written for Windows only, which again ties web development to the Microsoft platform.
If you want a "good" internet experience, then you have to use IE, to use IE you have to buy Windows (since they're killing off the stand-alone IE). This ties more developers into the loop of coding to the dominant browser (IE) rather than the standards, which ties them into more MS oriented development tools.
How much more competitive can it get?
In a market with actual competition that would work. Unfortunately Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, which puts it out of the supply/demand argument as they supply what they want, to whom they want, under whatever terms they want, to the detriment of an open market.
Most second tier Office products (WordPerfect, OOo, etc.) worry more about being able to produce MS Office documents than each others simply because they're trying to woo MS Office users. You're not going to significantly increase your OOo userbase touting its KOffice interoperability.
See, there's a difference between people who like to tinker with their computers, installing ghostscript, cygwin and the like in order to output a PDF file in "12 Easy Steps!" and the people who have more important things to do so they love a simple "Print to PDF" option.
Why not? It could help to fund the trip and maybe even get people interested in space again.
Babylon 5 did that a few times, most notably in the Aliance's attack on Earth's forces over Mars during the Earth Civil War.
As far as the SuSELiveCD's, I've never had any trouble with them. Perhaps you had an error during the download of the ISO the caused your CD to get burnt wonky.
As for SuSE 8.1, it's been excellent and I use it daily at home and work. I'll be snatching a copy of 8.2 as soon as it's released.
Yeah, it's all free software, and you could easily go out and compile all the stuff from code and integrate them together on your own. So why don't you, instead of waiting for SuSE or Redhat to do it for you? Oh, right, cause configuring all that crap by hand sucks balls.
Tell me this too, why does Redhat differentiate between RH8.0 and RH Enterprise Linux? Plus they have six different price levels for the Enterprise Linux package.
It's all Free software right? Right?