No, they're saying with the growing importance of those respective platforms, developers will follow the money.
Not to mention a) Margins. If you're early on tablets, you can probably make a nice profit before the competition shows up b) Market share. If a competitor dominates the PC, now's your chance to grab the mobile market. c) Novelty. With a new interface you have a chance to make something that hasn't been done before. d) Efficient mini-payment structure that makes $1 applications viable, which is easier for small devs.
And yes, people are really going tablet crazy... I just recently read an article about how they were flying off the shelves, there was this guy interviewed and he had one, his wife had one and now he was there to buy one for his kids - each. Most people are consumers and as a consumption device it's a runaway hit. So with a frenzy of new consumers who want apps for their new tablet, yeah I think Gartner for once is right (hey, they can't be wrong every time... accidents happen).
If you complain and scream bloody murder because the gender distribution is not 50%/50% in all professions, then you are a crackpot feminist.
If you run into one, say that men should demand that if both are fit to be parents the courts should award custody to the father until the gender distribution is 50/50 between single moms and single dads. She'll probably blow a fuse or three not realizing the hypocrisy of her position.
If someone talks about cutting supply to maximize profit, they are almost certainly talking about an economy that someone has regulated or restricted others from emtering in some way.
That's the libertarian delusion yes, that without any regulation there'd be perfect competition everywhere. Even if I notice that the grocery store down the corner is making a profit, I can't instantly be in competition with him. I need to rent/buy/build a store, hire staff, get supplier agreements, get transport agreements and what happens when I'm done? Oh the store lowers their prices making my profit opportunity vanish in a puff of smoke, running me out of business then raise their prices again. There are lots and lots of natural barriers to competition, naturally as a business manager you want to build more but no barriers at all is an incredibly idealistic textbook assumption. In fact without regulation you can do a lot more to restrict others from entering the market like dumping, exclusivity agreements, market collusion and abuse of monopoly keep markets captive.
Can you give me some insight as to why you switched from Linux to Windows 7 ? (...) So you reasons for Switching from Linux to Windows 7 might enlighten/teach me.
Well, like I said I managed to use it for 3.5 years so there was no deal breakers that I can point to, it was more the death of a thousand stings. A few off the top of my head:
1. Very often you want one or two new features in one application, but due to the nature of distros and dependencies, the lack of backports and my unwillingness to start compiling and dealing with those dependencies myself you often end up upgrading your distro - in my case every six months with another Kubuntu release. This almost every time leads to a) some kind of unexpected issue or b) some applications doing some major UI rework or some other change I didn't really ask for. With Win7 I feel that I can install practically any application without making changes to my "system", unless that application is running all is working as before. 2. Despite all that is said and done with WINE gaming on Linux requires a lot of tweaking, even if Steam should come to Linux a lot of games is built around DirectX that won't run natively. Ultimately it's a lot easier to run games made for Windows on Windows and where you know all the shitty issues is due to shitty games and not WINE bugs. A major part of that is that WINE has regressions, old games can suddenly break and waiting for a patch to fix the regression can take a long time. I think my record is about half a year unless you went back and installed an older version in a side-by-side arrangement. 3. The kernel is rock stable, but as I was on KDE at the time I was balancing between a working but almost abandoned KDE 3.5 and a buggy KDE 4.x, the kernel is rock stable but everything on top isn't nearly of the same quality. There's only so many times you can hear that the next 4.x+1 release will/has fixed everything before it sounds like the boy crying wolf. In my experience a lot of open source people say "it works" when they mean "it sorta works, with lots of tweaking". For better and for worse I find Windows troubleshooting much quicker comes down to "it works" or "it won't work" while on Linux you end up way down in the nitty gritty details and never really concluding. There's a ton of technical detail available but it's just not navigable and it's a huge time sink. 4. The various Linux chat clients have a mediocre interface to MSN, basic chat works but the rest is usually wonky. Which is kind of annoying when you want to talk to people there, who won't switch because they all use MSN. Same goes for browser plug-ins besides flash - that one worked more or less. The Citrix client was only a major pain to install. Usually something can be tweaked but on Windows this just works. It's not Linux's fault that MSN is using a proprietary protocol they're reverse engineering poorly, but like arguing whose blame it is doesn't solve the problem. It might not be a problem with Linux, but it's a problem trying to use Linux. 5. Almost all the good open source software is also on Windows, if you want LibreOffice and Firefox and whatnot you can run those. And you get the full selection of Windows software when that's not enough and those obscure Windows-only pieces of software you could never replace (I have two) run natively instead of dealing with WINE or a VirtualBox. I'd put it another way, start switching applications and if you run out of Windows-only applications then you can switch to Linux, it should be the last step in going open source not the first step.
In short, I ended up with long list of like tiny annoyances, and I couldn't really list any big pros. Yes it's free but if I take into account all the time I spent trying to fix little annoyances it just didn't pay off, not to mention I deal enough with IT stuff that doesn't work at work. The final straw was a borked upgrade, like if I need to do a clean install now I'll go Windows. Those installs usually last me years if I don't install any crapware.
The irony of your statement is that, with the advent of this fictional replicator, the baker would already have his new business model laid out in front of him: Bake his bread like usual, "record" it into the replicator, then charge a small fee for customer access to the replicator, in addition to selling the actual bread for those who want that.
That'd work great until someone found out it's cheaper to have a replicator at home or a dedicated place that does nothing but replication. You'd buy a loaf of bread from the baker once and the baker would never see any business from you again until he comes up with a new bread. And the moment he sold that bread to someone, that person could either undercut the baker on replicator access, compete by also selling the bread or just release it for free to everyone making sure the baker only gets the one sale. The baker has absolutely zero advantage from being the one who came up with the recipe and who baked the original bread.
You know, I've been resisting Linux all these years, but with the current direction of Windows development and greater Linux game support (Steam, etc.) I may make the switch yet...
You sound like me about 5 years ago, when Vista was supposed to be Microsoft's hot new OS. I figured the way that was going, I might as well go Linux now and get over the hassle of switching. Long story short I spent 3.5 years on Linux as my primary desktop before I gave up the fight and switched to Win7. If you want to try Linux go right ahead, but if you're just think Win8 is a dead end I suggest just buckling down with Win7 and see if Microsoft comes to their senses. There's plenty time and being 64 bit I think it's even more of a stayer than XP, that and SSD support were really the only two "must have" features of Win7 for me. I expect the coming decade to have even less such "must have" features.
Some cases of the flu are very light, I've sometimes been surprised when the doc tells me he thinks I have the flu. On the other hand, it once knocked me off my feet for 2-3 weeks a decade ago. My impression is that it's a bunch of loosely related viruses of different strength that all go under the same name and that the lower end overlaps quite significantly with the common cold in symptoms.
And you know what? The penalty he'll get for murdering 50+ people is probably less than what he's being charged with now. Chances are he'll be out in 10 years
Chances are you got a little carried away with your hyperbole. Or would you care to share with us a case of someone murdering 50+ people and being back out in 10 years or less?
Now you may argue that the baker "lost a sale" but I argue that's nonsense. I never would have paid for that bread anyway, especially since I don't like pumperknickel. So the potential for a sale never existed.
So you wouldn't have bought that bread, but I'm pretty sure you'd buy something to eat. I'm sure everybody can find a bread at the baker they wouldn't have paid for, so that they can get it for free. Everybody gets free bread and the baker makes no sales. Sounds sustainable. I'm sure you can fill your days with movies you wouldn't have watched, songs you wouldn't have heard, games you wouldn't have played and applications you'd never use if you had to pay full retail price for them. And if you would have used Linux instead of paying for Windows you should just go ahead and pirate Windows, it's not like Microsoft lost a sale right? And clearly you'd never pay $999 for Adobe Photoshop CS6 to edit your home photos, wow this is easy. Sure wish the real world was like that, I'd drive a Ferrari since I wouldn't want to pay for one.
Well, regarding point 2 I'd think it'd apply to character. Certainly you could in a battery case use a history of violence as proof that this is not an isolated case of losing your head but that the defendant has shown a pattern of violent behavior and lacks impulse control. I'm pretty sure the jury would convict the latter harder than the former.
The situation you describe would certainly be criminal infringement as it is performed on a commercial scale. No civil lawsuit would be necessary or sensible in such a case.
Not necessary, but often sensible because you don't have to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt unless your case is so watertight they're going to outright cave anyway.
If the alarmist behavior doesn't stop the whole environmentalist movement is going to be discredited (it's already happening with the youngest generation - their environmental uptake is markedly lower than people just a few years older than them). The environmental movement needs to get grounded back in reality and lay off the panic button when the case simply isn't there. Focus on what is there like shutting down dirty coal power plants and things that actually do matter.
Well, the biggest reason to worry isn't what you see around you, it's that there's a few billion people in India, China and a few other places that'd also like a western standard of living (not necessarily western way of living) and people are getting a bit fed up in that even though some of them are cutting down overall the world is gearing up anyway. Environmentalism is something that thrives when either a) the economy thrives and people have a surplus to act unselfishly and socially responsible or b) being environmentally friendly is also the cheapest option like using lesser gas. Otherwise when the going get tough it's all about cost optimization, it's you and your family first and something so big and vague as the environment will just have to wait until you've solved your more immediate issues. Lately there's a lot of those people.
I can't really say I see your point. If these changes are of a magnitude and rapidness found in natural variation then that makes it possible and the frequency with which it has historically happened would indicate whether it's probable or not. On the other hand, if the changes occurred with unprecedented magnitude or rapidness then that would be evidence to suggest it's not natural causes. Either way I'd say you know more with this research than you did without it.
If it's a feature then it's only because the application developers abuse modal dialogs. If you have any reason to want to look at a different window, then using a modal dialog was the wrong choice.
I think, for the most part, we're talking diminishing returns at this point adding pixels. So I'm a little baffled by this announcement. Is it real? Is there a serious market for TV for people with super exceptional eyesight?
Well that depends on how big the TV is and how close to it you sit. From a couch 9 feet away a person with 20/20 vision can't fully see 1080p on a 65" TV, so no most people looking at regular TVs are already fine. If you have a "big screen" like LGs 84" TV, Sharp's 90" TV or a 100-120" projector on the same distance or sit closer, then you have at least partial benefit from 4K/2160p resolution. And this is not too close, many sites confuse the SMPTE/THX minimum limits for the last row but the best seats are in the middle of the cinema with considerably wider viewing angle. Actually 120" would probably be painfully close like the very first row of the cinema but still within the THX limits.
The case for 8K is much, much weaker. No person with 20/20 vision would ever sit close enough to see more than 4K. That said, 20/20 is only the cut-off for "normal vision" that doesn't need any treatment, most people see closer to 20/16 in their youth so it's not an average. But even with 20/16 vision watching a 110" screen from 9 feet away - about as close as you comfortably can - you're only on the 4K threshold. Most of the population will never in their whole life see any benefit from 8K. There are a few exceptional people with vision all the way down to 20/8 so if you want like the limits of human vision then 8K is that limit so I guess it makes some point - at least on the recording side.
It won't be worth using over the Internet today, but who knows what the future will bring? During my time online I've gone from a 2400 baud modem to a 60 Mbit fiber line - that's over four orders of magnitude. I'd not be surprised if I in 10-20 years from now have a gigabit line. Back around 2001 as Napster was taking off the doomsday prophets were saying the Internet would collapse from the MP3 traffic, today they're a drop in the bit bucket. Not so long ago it was YouTube. If people start watching UDTV over the Internet, we will adapt with faster speeds and better compression. How countries relatively perform is one thing but Internet is getting faster year over year all around the world.
If you get $100 bucks you're lucky, my impression is that most are much lower. But as far as I understand, that's sort of the point of class action. Each person hasn't been harmed much and doesn't deserve a huge award, but if the company scams 1000000 people for $100 each they make a cool $100 million so the point is to punish the corporation. The problems are twofold:
1) The class action lawyers don't act in their clients' best interest. They want to rack up as huge a legal bill as they possibly can, knowing each client is again too small to complain about it since s/he's 1/1000000th of their case. Either by spending time in court or more commonly by settling in a way that's favorable to the lawyers and unfavorable to everyone else. Class actions should be done on commission, if you want to get paid more you have to settle for more. That'd put the incentive back in the right place trying to extract as much money as possible for your clients. 2) Extremely often the settlement doesn't actually involve cash, in involves a voucher or a discount for your next purchase even if you don't ever want to do business with them again. Not to mention people often never get around to spending them because they can't find anything they want to buy - even with the discount and it is forgotten or lost. Particularly for software the value is simply the sales value, it costs them nothing to churn out more copies. This could also be solved by requiring the payout be in cold hard cash.
By default I believe a 4 second press just hard reboots the computer and that's outside of the OS
I think it's 5 seconds and it's definitely a hard shutdown, not a hard reboot. If you want your computer to boot again, you must press the power button again (ideally after waiting a few seconds to let everything spin down before spinning it back up). In fact, that's the only time I use the power button - if I have a responsive GUI or CLI then I prefer shutting it down with the keyboard/mouse.
A lot of the high tech goods that have had a huge development are also on the high end of the consumption. A lot of the more basic income items like food, housing, transportation, entertainment haven't really changed all that much. Oh sure a 2012 car is very different from a 1962 car but it's not like you can get an insanely cheap "1962-style-in-2012" car, either you get a modern car or you get no car. Progress hasn't necessarily made it that much easier to live cheaply.
Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes "to clear" time.
Which is one of many reasons the last story smelled bad, who'd wait 10 minutes for their grocery payment to clear. The alternative would be that MasterCard or somebody guarantees the merchant gets paid before you disappear out the door with the goods, never to be seen again while your transaction bounces 10 minutes later. At the very best it would be something like having a credit card in a foreign currency where they take an exchange fee for converting your Bitcoins to US Dollars or whatever the local currency is, since I guess nobody would take Bitcoins.
Maybe some people can convince themselves that slutty dressed drunk teens "asked for it" - I can't - but I doubt anyone can justify a five year old being raped and killed in their "Just World". If you're watching the worst of the worst, you're looking at things that nobody could possibly deserve. I think it's more the opposite, if you take on a job like this any illusion you might have about a just world and your faith in humanity will be utterly and completely crushed. The world will be just a nasty and cruel and unfair place where you either grow a stone hide and heart or get crushed by it.
Three states in the US don't even allow insanity as a defense.
I haven't fact checked it but Wikipedia adds:
However, a mentally ill defendant/patient can be found unfit to stand trial in these states
Every population has a few people that are just bat shit insane, people that obviously aren't evil because they're so zoned out of reality they've got no idea what they're doing. I think they have pretty good tools to tell the really insane people from the ones who think they can play insane.
Also called 3.43 microBTC (of course slashdot doesn't support the mu sign, not like a nerdy site could need that). Probably around the same time Intel introduce their 0.000000008m processors.
Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
Yeah, going to a specialized 3rd party provider for safe long term storage is insane, you'd never put anything valuable in a bank vault would you? Would I put them in any random cloud? Not any more than I'd store my valuables in a shed, but with the right agreements in place on redundancy, backups, access control procedures and so on... maybe. Perhaps I'd use two and have redundant providers too. At least a company you have to remember that either way it's going to be run by people, whether you outsource it or not there could be bad apples. Maybe you think you can smell a bad one better among your own employees than they can, but most lack good self-assessment skills.
I'm guessing the catch is that since it's priced like the OEM version it's tied to the hardware you install it on, on the positive side it's a proper end user license, not a system builder's version. It means you don't have to sell it with hardware - not that anyone cared when I bought it alone - and you probably have a slightly better support - in the OEM agreement you essentially take over part of the support responsibility. I guess it doesn't matter much but if you're first doing the effort of making it legal you'd like it to be done properly with all the i's dotted and t's crossed, not just quasi-legally. The pricing on retail+upgrade was so that you'd have to be a bit stupid to buy it anyway - you can afford 3-4 OEM versions before the upgrade path becomes cheaper. If you then want to skip a few generations like Vista then it'll take 20+ years to break even.
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No, they're saying with the growing importance of those respective platforms, developers will follow the money.
Not to mention
a) Margins. If you're early on tablets, you can probably make a nice profit before the competition shows up
b) Market share. If a competitor dominates the PC, now's your chance to grab the mobile market.
c) Novelty. With a new interface you have a chance to make something that hasn't been done before.
d) Efficient mini-payment structure that makes $1 applications viable, which is easier for small devs.
And yes, people are really going tablet crazy... I just recently read an article about how they were flying off the shelves, there was this guy interviewed and he had one, his wife had one and now he was there to buy one for his kids - each. Most people are consumers and as a consumption device it's a runaway hit. So with a frenzy of new consumers who want apps for their new tablet, yeah I think Gartner for once is right (hey, they can't be wrong every time... accidents happen).
If you complain and scream bloody murder because the gender distribution is not 50%/50% in all professions, then you are a crackpot feminist.
If you run into one, say that men should demand that if both are fit to be parents the courts should award custody to the father until the gender distribution is 50/50 between single moms and single dads. She'll probably blow a fuse or three not realizing the hypocrisy of her position.
If someone talks about cutting supply to maximize profit, they are almost certainly talking about an economy that someone has regulated or restricted others from emtering in some way.
That's the libertarian delusion yes, that without any regulation there'd be perfect competition everywhere. Even if I notice that the grocery store down the corner is making a profit, I can't instantly be in competition with him. I need to rent/buy/build a store, hire staff, get supplier agreements, get transport agreements and what happens when I'm done? Oh the store lowers their prices making my profit opportunity vanish in a puff of smoke, running me out of business then raise their prices again. There are lots and lots of natural barriers to competition, naturally as a business manager you want to build more but no barriers at all is an incredibly idealistic textbook assumption. In fact without regulation you can do a lot more to restrict others from entering the market like dumping, exclusivity agreements, market collusion and abuse of monopoly keep markets captive.
MSE keeps track of every process, and asks you to submit any it doesnt know.
Yeah, I've noticed that because it doesn't take no for an answer. Doesn't matter how many times I say no, it'll still nag me to send it to Microsoft.
Can you give me some insight as to why you switched from Linux to Windows 7 ? (...) So you reasons for Switching from Linux to Windows 7 might enlighten/teach me.
Well, like I said I managed to use it for 3.5 years so there was no deal breakers that I can point to, it was more the death of a thousand stings. A few off the top of my head:
1. Very often you want one or two new features in one application, but due to the nature of distros and dependencies, the lack of backports and my unwillingness to start compiling and dealing with those dependencies myself you often end up upgrading your distro - in my case every six months with another Kubuntu release. This almost every time leads to a) some kind of unexpected issue or b) some applications doing some major UI rework or some other change I didn't really ask for. With Win7 I feel that I can install practically any application without making changes to my "system", unless that application is running all is working as before.
2. Despite all that is said and done with WINE gaming on Linux requires a lot of tweaking, even if Steam should come to Linux a lot of games is built around DirectX that won't run natively. Ultimately it's a lot easier to run games made for Windows on Windows and where you know all the shitty issues is due to shitty games and not WINE bugs. A major part of that is that WINE has regressions, old games can suddenly break and waiting for a patch to fix the regression can take a long time. I think my record is about half a year unless you went back and installed an older version in a side-by-side arrangement.
3. The kernel is rock stable, but as I was on KDE at the time I was balancing between a working but almost abandoned KDE 3.5 and a buggy KDE 4.x, the kernel is rock stable but everything on top isn't nearly of the same quality. There's only so many times you can hear that the next 4.x+1 release will/has fixed everything before it sounds like the boy crying wolf. In my experience a lot of open source people say "it works" when they mean "it sorta works, with lots of tweaking". For better and for worse I find Windows troubleshooting much quicker comes down to "it works" or "it won't work" while on Linux you end up way down in the nitty gritty details and never really concluding. There's a ton of technical detail available but it's just not navigable and it's a huge time sink.
4. The various Linux chat clients have a mediocre interface to MSN, basic chat works but the rest is usually wonky. Which is kind of annoying when you want to talk to people there, who won't switch because they all use MSN. Same goes for browser plug-ins besides flash - that one worked more or less. The Citrix client was only a major pain to install. Usually something can be tweaked but on Windows this just works. It's not Linux's fault that MSN is using a proprietary protocol they're reverse engineering poorly, but like arguing whose blame it is doesn't solve the problem. It might not be a problem with Linux, but it's a problem trying to use Linux.
5. Almost all the good open source software is also on Windows, if you want LibreOffice and Firefox and whatnot you can run those. And you get the full selection of Windows software when that's not enough and those obscure Windows-only pieces of software you could never replace (I have two) run natively instead of dealing with WINE or a VirtualBox. I'd put it another way, start switching applications and if you run out of Windows-only applications then you can switch to Linux, it should be the last step in going open source not the first step.
In short, I ended up with long list of like tiny annoyances, and I couldn't really list any big pros. Yes it's free but if I take into account all the time I spent trying to fix little annoyances it just didn't pay off, not to mention I deal enough with IT stuff that doesn't work at work. The final straw was a borked upgrade, like if I need to do a clean install now I'll go Windows. Those installs usually last me years if I don't install any crapware.
The irony of your statement is that, with the advent of this fictional replicator, the baker would already have his new business model laid out in front of him: Bake his bread like usual, "record" it into the replicator, then charge a small fee for customer access to the replicator, in addition to selling the actual bread for those who want that.
That'd work great until someone found out it's cheaper to have a replicator at home or a dedicated place that does nothing but replication. You'd buy a loaf of bread from the baker once and the baker would never see any business from you again until he comes up with a new bread. And the moment he sold that bread to someone, that person could either undercut the baker on replicator access, compete by also selling the bread or just release it for free to everyone making sure the baker only gets the one sale. The baker has absolutely zero advantage from being the one who came up with the recipe and who baked the original bread.
You know, I've been resisting Linux all these years, but with the current direction of Windows development and greater Linux game support (Steam, etc.) I may make the switch yet...
You sound like me about 5 years ago, when Vista was supposed to be Microsoft's hot new OS. I figured the way that was going, I might as well go Linux now and get over the hassle of switching. Long story short I spent 3.5 years on Linux as my primary desktop before I gave up the fight and switched to Win7. If you want to try Linux go right ahead, but if you're just think Win8 is a dead end I suggest just buckling down with Win7 and see if Microsoft comes to their senses. There's plenty time and being 64 bit I think it's even more of a stayer than XP, that and SSD support were really the only two "must have" features of Win7 for me. I expect the coming decade to have even less such "must have" features.
Some cases of the flu are very light, I've sometimes been surprised when the doc tells me he thinks I have the flu. On the other hand, it once knocked me off my feet for 2-3 weeks a decade ago. My impression is that it's a bunch of loosely related viruses of different strength that all go under the same name and that the lower end overlaps quite significantly with the common cold in symptoms.
And you know what? The penalty he'll get for murdering 50+ people is probably less than what he's being charged with now. Chances are he'll be out in 10 years
Chances are you got a little carried away with your hyperbole. Or would you care to share with us a case of someone murdering 50+ people and being back out in 10 years or less?
Now you may argue that the baker "lost a sale" but I argue that's nonsense. I never would have paid for that bread anyway, especially since I don't like pumperknickel. So the potential for a sale never existed.
So you wouldn't have bought that bread, but I'm pretty sure you'd buy something to eat. I'm sure everybody can find a bread at the baker they wouldn't have paid for, so that they can get it for free. Everybody gets free bread and the baker makes no sales. Sounds sustainable. I'm sure you can fill your days with movies you wouldn't have watched, songs you wouldn't have heard, games you wouldn't have played and applications you'd never use if you had to pay full retail price for them. And if you would have used Linux instead of paying for Windows you should just go ahead and pirate Windows, it's not like Microsoft lost a sale right? And clearly you'd never pay $999 for Adobe Photoshop CS6 to edit your home photos, wow this is easy. Sure wish the real world was like that, I'd drive a Ferrari since I wouldn't want to pay for one.
Well, regarding point 2 I'd think it'd apply to character. Certainly you could in a battery case use a history of violence as proof that this is not an isolated case of losing your head but that the defendant has shown a pattern of violent behavior and lacks impulse control. I'm pretty sure the jury would convict the latter harder than the former.
The situation you describe would certainly be criminal infringement as it is performed on a commercial scale. No civil lawsuit would be necessary or sensible in such a case.
Not necessary, but often sensible because you don't have to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt unless your case is so watertight they're going to outright cave anyway.
If the alarmist behavior doesn't stop the whole environmentalist movement is going to be discredited (it's already happening with the youngest generation - their environmental uptake is markedly lower than people just a few years older than them). The environmental movement needs to get grounded back in reality and lay off the panic button when the case simply isn't there. Focus on what is there like shutting down dirty coal power plants and things that actually do matter.
Well, the biggest reason to worry isn't what you see around you, it's that there's a few billion people in India, China and a few other places that'd also like a western standard of living (not necessarily western way of living) and people are getting a bit fed up in that even though some of them are cutting down overall the world is gearing up anyway. Environmentalism is something that thrives when either a) the economy thrives and people have a surplus to act unselfishly and socially responsible or b) being environmentally friendly is also the cheapest option like using lesser gas. Otherwise when the going get tough it's all about cost optimization, it's you and your family first and something so big and vague as the environment will just have to wait until you've solved your more immediate issues. Lately there's a lot of those people.
I can't really say I see your point. If these changes are of a magnitude and rapidness found in natural variation then that makes it possible and the frequency with which it has historically happened would indicate whether it's probable or not. On the other hand, if the changes occurred with unprecedented magnitude or rapidness then that would be evidence to suggest it's not natural causes. Either way I'd say you know more with this research than you did without it.
If it's a feature then it's only because the application developers abuse modal dialogs. If you have any reason to want to look at a different window, then using a modal dialog was the wrong choice.
I think, for the most part, we're talking diminishing returns at this point adding pixels. So I'm a little baffled by this announcement. Is it real? Is there a serious market for TV for people with super exceptional eyesight?
Well that depends on how big the TV is and how close to it you sit. From a couch 9 feet away a person with 20/20 vision can't fully see 1080p on a 65" TV, so no most people looking at regular TVs are already fine. If you have a "big screen" like LGs 84" TV, Sharp's 90" TV or a 100-120" projector on the same distance or sit closer, then you have at least partial benefit from 4K/2160p resolution. And this is not too close, many sites confuse the SMPTE/THX minimum limits for the last row but the best seats are in the middle of the cinema with considerably wider viewing angle. Actually 120" would probably be painfully close like the very first row of the cinema but still within the THX limits.
The case for 8K is much, much weaker. No person with 20/20 vision would ever sit close enough to see more than 4K. That said, 20/20 is only the cut-off for "normal vision" that doesn't need any treatment, most people see closer to 20/16 in their youth so it's not an average. But even with 20/16 vision watching a 110" screen from 9 feet away - about as close as you comfortably can - you're only on the 4K threshold. Most of the population will never in their whole life see any benefit from 8K. There are a few exceptional people with vision all the way down to 20/8 so if you want like the limits of human vision then 8K is that limit so I guess it makes some point - at least on the recording side.
It won't be worth using over the Internet today, but who knows what the future will bring? During my time online I've gone from a 2400 baud modem to a 60 Mbit fiber line - that's over four orders of magnitude. I'd not be surprised if I in 10-20 years from now have a gigabit line. Back around 2001 as Napster was taking off the doomsday prophets were saying the Internet would collapse from the MP3 traffic, today they're a drop in the bit bucket. Not so long ago it was YouTube. If people start watching UDTV over the Internet, we will adapt with faster speeds and better compression. How countries relatively perform is one thing but Internet is getting faster year over year all around the world.
If you get $100 bucks you're lucky, my impression is that most are much lower. But as far as I understand, that's sort of the point of class action. Each person hasn't been harmed much and doesn't deserve a huge award, but if the company scams 1000000 people for $100 each they make a cool $100 million so the point is to punish the corporation. The problems are twofold:
1) The class action lawyers don't act in their clients' best interest. They want to rack up as huge a legal bill as they possibly can, knowing each client is again too small to complain about it since s/he's 1/1000000th of their case. Either by spending time in court or more commonly by settling in a way that's favorable to the lawyers and unfavorable to everyone else. Class actions should be done on commission, if you want to get paid more you have to settle for more. That'd put the incentive back in the right place trying to extract as much money as possible for your clients.
2) Extremely often the settlement doesn't actually involve cash, in involves a voucher or a discount for your next purchase even if you don't ever want to do business with them again. Not to mention people often never get around to spending them because they can't find anything they want to buy - even with the discount and it is forgotten or lost. Particularly for software the value is simply the sales value, it costs them nothing to churn out more copies. This could also be solved by requiring the payout be in cold hard cash.
By default I believe a 4 second press just hard reboots the computer and that's outside of the OS
I think it's 5 seconds and it's definitely a hard shutdown, not a hard reboot. If you want your computer to boot again, you must press the power button again (ideally after waiting a few seconds to let everything spin down before spinning it back up). In fact, that's the only time I use the power button - if I have a responsive GUI or CLI then I prefer shutting it down with the keyboard/mouse.
A lot of the high tech goods that have had a huge development are also on the high end of the consumption. A lot of the more basic income items like food, housing, transportation, entertainment haven't really changed all that much. Oh sure a 2012 car is very different from a 1962 car but it's not like you can get an insanely cheap "1962-style-in-2012" car, either you get a modern car or you get no car. Progress hasn't necessarily made it that much easier to live cheaply.
Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes "to clear" time.
Which is one of many reasons the last story smelled bad, who'd wait 10 minutes for their grocery payment to clear. The alternative would be that MasterCard or somebody guarantees the merchant gets paid before you disappear out the door with the goods, never to be seen again while your transaction bounces 10 minutes later. At the very best it would be something like having a credit card in a foreign currency where they take an exchange fee for converting your Bitcoins to US Dollars or whatever the local currency is, since I guess nobody would take Bitcoins.
Maybe some people can convince themselves that slutty dressed drunk teens "asked for it" - I can't - but I doubt anyone can justify a five year old being raped and killed in their "Just World". If you're watching the worst of the worst, you're looking at things that nobody could possibly deserve. I think it's more the opposite, if you take on a job like this any illusion you might have about a just world and your faith in humanity will be utterly and completely crushed. The world will be just a nasty and cruel and unfair place where you either grow a stone hide and heart or get crushed by it.
Three states in the US don't even allow insanity as a defense.
I haven't fact checked it but Wikipedia adds:
However, a mentally ill defendant/patient can be found unfit to stand trial in these states
Every population has a few people that are just bat shit insane, people that obviously aren't evil because they're so zoned out of reality they've got no idea what they're doing. I think they have pretty good tools to tell the really insane people from the ones who think they can play insane.
Also called 3.43 microBTC (of course slashdot doesn't support the mu sign, not like a nerdy site could need that). Probably around the same time Intel introduce their 0.000000008m processors.
Where should I put sensitive documents that must be safely stored for a long time? In the cloud, of course!
Yeah, going to a specialized 3rd party provider for safe long term storage is insane, you'd never put anything valuable in a bank vault would you? Would I put them in any random cloud? Not any more than I'd store my valuables in a shed, but with the right agreements in place on redundancy, backups, access control procedures and so on... maybe. Perhaps I'd use two and have redundant providers too. At least a company you have to remember that either way it's going to be run by people, whether you outsource it or not there could be bad apples. Maybe you think you can smell a bad one better among your own employees than they can, but most lack good self-assessment skills.
I'm guessing the catch is that since it's priced like the OEM version it's tied to the hardware you install it on, on the positive side it's a proper end user license, not a system builder's version. It means you don't have to sell it with hardware - not that anyone cared when I bought it alone - and you probably have a slightly better support - in the OEM agreement you essentially take over part of the support responsibility. I guess it doesn't matter much but if you're first doing the effort of making it legal you'd like it to be done properly with all the i's dotted and t's crossed, not just quasi-legally. The pricing on retail+upgrade was so that you'd have to be a bit stupid to buy it anyway - you can afford 3-4 OEM versions before the upgrade path becomes cheaper. If you then want to skip a few generations like Vista then it'll take 20+ years to break even.