Not in general. But those cases will then typically be cited in the next lawsuit over A and often end up with some appellate or supreme court taking them on if the lower court decisions are conflicting. As far as I know it doesn't go back to resolve things either, just going forward the precedent is now set that the law says so and so. That only applies to findings of law though, when it comes to findings of facts pretty much anything can happen as they interpret the evidence differently.
Doesn't matter. If you fooled people into thinking a handbag is a new Gucci design, complete with the Gucci logo and all then that would be a counterfeit Gucci whether they actually make a handbag that looks anything like it or not. All that matters is that you present it as an official product, whether it exists or not.
Eat them, I don't know... but hunt them to extinction should be no problem at all, they're not exactly small and hard to spot. The more problematic bits would be if they've brought microbes with them, upset the balance of nature some other way etc. - it's a gamble with very many variables...
There's also the little gem that you can't pre-pay the electronic meters for the next morning--so yeah, it's free from 11PM to 7AM, but you have to be there on the dot of 7AM to beat the ticket-wielding meter maid summoned by the electronic sensor.
Now that is retarded. Here in Norway they've managed to do that ever since they went away from physical meters at each parking spot to one machine that prints paper tickets for cash like 20 years ago. That way they don't have to give change either, if it costs 16 NOK to stay until end of parking and you put on a 20 NOK coin then tough shit, you got parking for next morning or for Monday. Pay after end of paid parking and it starts counting from next morning like you'd expect. Oh well...
Re:Under actual news, IE 6 market share grows.
on
Firefox 10 Released
·
· Score: 2
Not sure where they got their figures from, but I imagine it's something to do with country figures etc. being updated, which can lead to such odd jumps. At StatCounter IE6 continued down from 1.78% to 1.56% and Chrome grew a lot. Firefox is on the downward trend though, though not as bad as IE. In fact at last month's rate of change (with all the dangers of extrapolation) Chrome would overtake IE as the world's #1 web browser in four months, at least according to StatCounter. They seem to disagree with 10-15% percentage points now.
I think that works well for the kernel, which isn't actually a end-user visible system, plus it's a cumulative system where you can expect that if you have a kernel bigger than x.y.z then all is well. For GUI software I'd very much recommend a "redesign.features.patch" pattern where
"redesign" means we've moved things around, no guarantees about anything "features" means we may have added some menu items, expanded some dialogs and such, but if you knew how to use the old functionality you should still be able to do it "patch" will only change bugs, not the interface
For example taking away the status bar I think qualified for a 4.0 release. This functionality used to be here, now it's not and if you want it look elsewhere. Many of the other changes seem lesser, some you practically don't notice. Perhaps you should keep a separate plugin interface version number, I don't know. From the user side it just looks a bit random.
Just admit that it's because it's old and random, there's a few HTML entities working but there's no reason why æ = æ should would and μ = shouldn't - like in micrograms, or uTorrent. It's a geeky site, but it's made for writing English prose with some half-hearted Latin1 support, no math or science.
The world is too connected for that. Any country that tried would instantly become the distribution hub for the rest of the world, which would bring the collective wrath of copyright pundits in all other countries down on you. Reminds me of that East European politician that wanted to lower the age to star in porn to match the age of consent, he got a massive international shitstorm. Now why would all these countries give a shit about what a fart of a country a continent away does? Because if it's legal to watch two 17yos fuck there, you can bet those movies would go all over the world via the Internet. That's why after the DMCA they pushed the EUCD and continues to push anti-circumvention laws everywhere they can, it does them no good if they're only illegal in the US if they're ripped abroad and already unencumbered when they're downloaded in the US. Same with YouTube when they refuse to comply with anything but US law, unless you want to go Chinese on them you just have to realize that your citizens will go there and see whatever it is you don't want them to see. It's a nice idea but the time when your country could do it your way and my country could do it my way and they actually stayed independent is long past. It has its good sides but it also makes it almost impossible to be the one country that radically cuts copyright.
Perhaps because they are in the US and the DMCA is their laws, while TPB is not? Okay so they did a lot of other things too but I'd also tell someone acting like US law is world law to fuck off.
The possibility is being discussed in Swedish media (via google translate), in fact they specifically mention Google and YouTube. There's nothing specific in the ruling that clearly says that they wouldn't be liable, basically it seems to criminalize all sites that make copyright infringement easier and faster. The wording is very broad and vague, maybe they didn't see anything worth reviewing with regards to TPB but they certainly didn't make things clear on where illegal services end and legal services begin, or even what separates them.
the quickest way to fail in an IT career is to do everything the user wants.
And the second quickest way is to do nothing the user wants. The best employees choose to work for you, they won't be heading for the unemployment line but straight to your worst competitor and even if they don't contributing to poor employee morale isn't doing the company a favor either. Yes, IT often has to be the party pooper but there's a huge difference between trying to be cooperative and productive finding solutions within the policies and declaring that they have one solution that fits all IT's requirements and those that don't like it can go suck eggs.
I've met my share of policies that seem to have completely detached from any business need and has turned more into a control obsession. Or maybe it's some misunderstood form of standardization, desktop hardening or reducing support cost that lead them to disable everything that can be disabled through group policies, not because I think there's been any business case for it but simply because they can. Many users have found it's really the user vs IT not the user vs the company, only the IT department waving the company's banner. Nobody at the top really decided to be that anal.
Uh, you're aware that the page you link to in the graph for the US says: Purchase-only House Price Index, Seasonally Adjusted (Q1 1991=100). It's an index, not dollars. For example this listed in dollars says $2000/m^2 in city center, $1300/m^2 outside. And that will vary greatly inside the US, they're almost as big as Europe so low/highs there are pretty much like low/highs in Europe - much bigger spread.
Maybe that the first of the 28nm process generation costs about the same as the last of the 40nm process generation released a year and a half ago? Currently the effect on the price/performance ratio has been almost nothing, they've offered higher performance at a higher price. Yes, the 7950 is now beating the GTX 580 in most ways but it's not exactly a massively better deal. Hopefully nVidia will be a bit more aggressive but if they're both held back by TSMC's delivery capacity the duel can get a bit lame.
According to MSI via Fudzilla, the 77xx series will launch in two weeks at $139/$149 and the 78xx series in March at $249/$299. After that the ball is in nVidia's court, but the current guesses are they're not ready until April, sometime around Intel's Ivy Bridge processors. I think it's working, I've looked at the 7950s and is tempted but will probably wait until then and see if they bring better performance or lower prices, if nothing else to get a better price from AMD. Currently the 7950 costs about double (in NOK at least) what I paid for my 5850 in 2009, which is rather disappointing - then again that was a steal I got before the MSRP price hike.
The Catalyst drivers just landed on the 27th of Januray I think, before that there was a hotfix release for real enthusiasts. Open source support is as far as I know still missing, but basic support should not be far away. They've consistently come closer to release date with each release, last it took 2.5 months and I expect less this time. If you want it the moment it's released expect to compile your own kernel/xorg/driver though. Don't expect any miracles from the OSS drivers though, as I understand it there's some major rework going on because of the architecture changes.
That would imply that MegaUpload was the whole problem, and the problem was now resolved. Yes, they were able to take down MegaUpload using paragraphs designed for the Mafia and things like that (RICO) but that is usually just the tip of the iceberg. If you're talking to a person that argues that piracy must be stomped out, then I'm not going to argue that the existing laws still stop piracy because they won't. Neither would SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and all the king's horses and all the king's men, but it would put every site that allows user uploaded content at risk.
Only big corporations with lots of lawyers like Google will afford to operate a photo/music/video/file sharing site because it can be used for infringing files and that will get you shut down. You don't even get your day in court, boom and your DNS is gone which practically means your site has been banned from the Internet. No rule of law, no due process, it's basically going back a thousand years to before the Magna Carta, but instead of the King you have Hollywood making decisions at a whim. And if he thinks it doesn't apply to him, tell him that yes it will.. because when he's going to share his family photos or home videos those services won't be there because they've been shut down.
Perhaps he does not even fundamentally doesn't understand what he's asking for. They want to shut down your phone carrier because they're not listening to your calls, that's the essence of it. They only want to provide a communication service, but you don't think that's enough. Criminals could use the phone! It's like demanding voice recognition and text analysis to find possible criminal phone calls and forward them to the police, and if they don't well with proof that crimes have been planned on the phone they will get shut down. That's the model they want for the Internet.
3. the E8 is a converted 707...didn't they stop building those in the 1970s? If this is a 30 year old airframe (at best) then either that damage is $25 million or the plane is worth less than $240 million today.
They're probably comparing apples and oranges here, the new cost was $244 million but the planes have been in service of some form since 1991, the accident was in 2009. Secondly, that probably includes a lot of R&D costs so a $25 million dollar could be a much larger part of the production cost. Third, maybe the military's needs have changed or other types of craft do better, it might make sense to operate but not necessarily to spend that much to keep it in service.
Finally, as I understand it this damage was done by a subcontractor. When I use subcontractors, they have liability insurance to cover the systems they're working on, plus potential liabilities. Doesn't the US government require AT LEAST such protections when farming out work to contractors?
They certainly could, but nothing comes free so the government would have to pay higher rates. If you're big enough you may choose to take that risk yourself and use incidents like this in performance evaluations and future negotiations instead.
"Taken away" seems to imply it's been given to somebody else, which is false. The assets have been frozen so they can't spend them, sell them, give them away or transfer them out of the country so that plaintiffs that have been legitimately grieved will get paid after the trial, not unlike the safety deposit on my apartment. It's still my money, it's in my name but I can't empty that account because it's the insurance the landlord has that I have at least some money to pay for damages to the apartment. Otherwise people that think they would lose everything would get rid of all their assets so there'd be nothing to cease.
To use a case people here at/. should be familiar with, for how many years would you like SCO to be able to squander Novell's money before there's a final verdict? You're never going to be able to "take back" wages or operating expenses like these hosting costs, even if it turns out this money was illegally gained - they're lost, because they'll never pay you back. Every expense is another dollar they got to illegally spend of your money. So there's two forms of injustice here, the cease of legal funds and the squander of ill-gotten funds, if you want to suggest a better balance go ahead.
You still require a basic DVD-ROM to even begin to physically read the disk. I don't think that is forced, and certainly not by law. You have a choice of DVD hardware to purchase.
Sure, you can pick the logo on the player but you don't have a choice. To play DVDs it must have a CSS key, to get a CSS key it must follow the CSS license and to play it in any other way would violate the DMCA (or EUCD in Europe or whatever fits your region). It doesn't matter if you've legally bought and own the disc, if you find a way to play it on your own you're a criminal. And because every manufacturer is under the whip of the CSS license, so are you. If they want to enforce region codes or don't want you to fast forward past the commercials they can impose those conditions on the manufacturers through the license who will then impose those restrictions on you. It's not required by law, they've just taken away all other ways of doing it legally - but it works much the same.
Yeah, TPB would be bettter replaced by an.onion site on TOR. I doubt a single site could handle it though since you're limited by your peer bandwidth, but make the main URL a round-robin redirect to other onion sites so you spread the load over many nodes you should be able to create The Pirate Onion. Navigating the site would feel like you're on dial-up but it'd be enough to get to the magnet links and start torrents. And it'd all stay in TOR-land so you wouldn't have any of the exit node issues.
it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
And even detecting and deflecting a potentially Earth-shattering asteroid would probably be easier than any of the other suggestions here. Most of the things that are so destructive they could wipe out life on Earth would probably wipe out a Mars colony too, in space terms it's like building your offsite backup next door. A habitable exoplanet would be the only true redundancy and by nature it'd have to be totally independent too. We just have a few minor details to work out...
Even if that is true, causing waves might not be such a bad thing. First single out Apple, then as they are forced to raise standards to beat the bad PR you can run stories on other companies creating waves in the other direction until all are lifted up a notch. Why Apple? Because right now they're making huge profits, it's a lot easier to argue they can afford it than a competitor that's struggling and running a lot of cost cutting measures to stay afloat. Of course they're not going to stop being profit-seeking, but it's generally expected that there's a trickle-down effect so that working for a profitable company is better than an unprofitable one...
Well, a lot of systems force a normal distribution on everything where the average will get C on an A-F scale, but it's not without side effects. I went to a rather prestigious study, like only the top 5-10% students would be qualified to get in. For classes that we shared with other studies like math classes we'd pretty much all get As and Bs, and the trend mostly stayed in other classes too because it was silly to say this was a D or E grade project even if you were slightly worse than all the other really bright people.
Then in our final year we had one class where they insisted to use the whole scale and distribute us and the results were ridiculous, people that had never ever in their life been below a B grade were getting D, E and even a few F - fail, even if I knew these were extremely bright people who'd know the curriculum intimately. That is not fair either when you get an E and the least worst of the bunch from Yokel University got an A and while there's some prestige to the education institution you went to it doesn't really make up for that.
To get nearer our goal, computers are getting components that are less flexible.
Actually, computers have lost lots of dedicated processing units because it just wasn't worth doing in dedicated hardware, that's where for example softmodems (aka winmodems) came from. And with GPUs going from fixed pipelines to programmable shader units, they too have gone the other way. Dedicated hardware only works if you are doing a large number of exactly defined calculations from a well established standard, like say AES or H.264. Even in a supercomputer the job just isn't static enough, if the researchers have to tweak the algorithm are you going to do build a new computer? You have parameters, but the moment they say "oh and we have to add a new correction factor here" you're totally screwed. Not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in general. But those cases will then typically be cited in the next lawsuit over A and often end up with some appellate or supreme court taking them on if the lower court decisions are conflicting. As far as I know it doesn't go back to resolve things either, just going forward the precedent is now set that the law says so and so. That only applies to findings of law though, when it comes to findings of facts pretty much anything can happen as they interpret the evidence differently.
Heh, reminds me of this one...
Q: How do you know an elephant is hiding under your bed?
A: Your nose is touching the ceiling....
Doesn't matter. If you fooled people into thinking a handbag is a new Gucci design, complete with the Gucci logo and all then that would be a counterfeit Gucci whether they actually make a handbag that looks anything like it or not. All that matters is that you present it as an official product, whether it exists or not.
Eat them, I don't know... but hunt them to extinction should be no problem at all, they're not exactly small and hard to spot. The more problematic bits would be if they've brought microbes with them, upset the balance of nature some other way etc. - it's a gamble with very many variables...
There's also the little gem that you can't pre-pay the electronic meters for the next morning--so yeah, it's free from 11PM to 7AM, but you have to be there on the dot of 7AM to beat the ticket-wielding meter maid summoned by the electronic sensor.
Now that is retarded. Here in Norway they've managed to do that ever since they went away from physical meters at each parking spot to one machine that prints paper tickets for cash like 20 years ago. That way they don't have to give change either, if it costs 16 NOK to stay until end of parking and you put on a 20 NOK coin then tough shit, you got parking for next morning or for Monday. Pay after end of paid parking and it starts counting from next morning like you'd expect. Oh well...
Not sure where they got their figures from, but I imagine it's something to do with country figures etc. being updated, which can lead to such odd jumps. At StatCounter IE6 continued down from 1.78% to 1.56% and Chrome grew a lot. Firefox is on the downward trend though, though not as bad as IE. In fact at last month's rate of change (with all the dangers of extrapolation) Chrome would overtake IE as the world's #1 web browser in four months, at least according to StatCounter. They seem to disagree with 10-15% percentage points now.
I think that works well for the kernel, which isn't actually a end-user visible system, plus it's a cumulative system where you can expect that if you have a kernel bigger than x.y.z then all is well. For GUI software I'd very much recommend a "redesign.features.patch" pattern where
"redesign" means we've moved things around, no guarantees about anything
"features" means we may have added some menu items, expanded some dialogs and such, but if you knew how to use the old functionality you should still be able to do it
"patch" will only change bugs, not the interface
For example taking away the status bar I think qualified for a 4.0 release. This functionality used to be here, now it's not and if you want it look elsewhere. Many of the other changes seem lesser, some you practically don't notice. Perhaps you should keep a separate plugin interface version number, I don't know. From the user side it just looks a bit random.
Just admit that it's because it's old and random, there's a few HTML entities working but there's no reason why æ = æ should would and μ = shouldn't - like in micrograms, or uTorrent. It's a geeky site, but it's made for writing English prose with some half-hearted Latin1 support, no math or science.
The world is too connected for that. Any country that tried would instantly become the distribution hub for the rest of the world, which would bring the collective wrath of copyright pundits in all other countries down on you. Reminds me of that East European politician that wanted to lower the age to star in porn to match the age of consent, he got a massive international shitstorm. Now why would all these countries give a shit about what a fart of a country a continent away does? Because if it's legal to watch two 17yos fuck there, you can bet those movies would go all over the world via the Internet. That's why after the DMCA they pushed the EUCD and continues to push anti-circumvention laws everywhere they can, it does them no good if they're only illegal in the US if they're ripped abroad and already unencumbered when they're downloaded in the US. Same with YouTube when they refuse to comply with anything but US law, unless you want to go Chinese on them you just have to realize that your citizens will go there and see whatever it is you don't want them to see. It's a nice idea but the time when your country could do it your way and my country could do it my way and they actually stayed independent is long past. It has its good sides but it also makes it almost impossible to be the one country that radically cuts copyright.
Perhaps because they are in the US and the DMCA is their laws, while TPB is not? Okay so they did a lot of other things too but I'd also tell someone acting like US law is world law to fuck off.
The possibility is being discussed in Swedish media (via google translate), in fact they specifically mention Google and YouTube. There's nothing specific in the ruling that clearly says that they wouldn't be liable, basically it seems to criminalize all sites that make copyright infringement easier and faster. The wording is very broad and vague, maybe they didn't see anything worth reviewing with regards to TPB but they certainly didn't make things clear on where illegal services end and legal services begin, or even what separates them.
the quickest way to fail in an IT career is to do everything the user wants.
And the second quickest way is to do nothing the user wants. The best employees choose to work for you, they won't be heading for the unemployment line but straight to your worst competitor and even if they don't contributing to poor employee morale isn't doing the company a favor either. Yes, IT often has to be the party pooper but there's a huge difference between trying to be cooperative and productive finding solutions within the policies and declaring that they have one solution that fits all IT's requirements and those that don't like it can go suck eggs.
I've met my share of policies that seem to have completely detached from any business need and has turned more into a control obsession. Or maybe it's some misunderstood form of standardization, desktop hardening or reducing support cost that lead them to disable everything that can be disabled through group policies, not because I think there's been any business case for it but simply because they can. Many users have found it's really the user vs IT not the user vs the company, only the IT department waving the company's banner. Nobody at the top really decided to be that anal.
vs 200$/m2 in USA.
Uh, you're aware that the page you link to in the graph for the US says: Purchase-only House Price Index, Seasonally Adjusted (Q1 1991=100). It's an index, not dollars. For example this listed in dollars says $2000/m^2 in city center, $1300/m^2 outside. And that will vary greatly inside the US, they're almost as big as Europe so low/highs there are pretty much like low/highs in Europe - much bigger spread.
Maybe that the first of the 28nm process generation costs about the same as the last of the 40nm process generation released a year and a half ago? Currently the effect on the price/performance ratio has been almost nothing, they've offered higher performance at a higher price. Yes, the 7950 is now beating the GTX 580 in most ways but it's not exactly a massively better deal. Hopefully nVidia will be a bit more aggressive but if they're both held back by TSMC's delivery capacity the duel can get a bit lame.
According to MSI via Fudzilla, the 77xx series will launch in two weeks at $139/$149 and the 78xx series in March at $249/$299. After that the ball is in nVidia's court, but the current guesses are they're not ready until April, sometime around Intel's Ivy Bridge processors. I think it's working, I've looked at the 7950s and is tempted but will probably wait until then and see if they bring better performance or lower prices, if nothing else to get a better price from AMD. Currently the 7950 costs about double (in NOK at least) what I paid for my 5850 in 2009, which is rather disappointing - then again that was a steal I got before the MSRP price hike.
The Catalyst drivers just landed on the 27th of Januray I think, before that there was a hotfix release for real enthusiasts. Open source support is as far as I know still missing, but basic support should not be far away. They've consistently come closer to release date with each release, last it took 2.5 months and I expect less this time. If you want it the moment it's released expect to compile your own kernel/xorg/driver though. Don't expect any miracles from the OSS drivers though, as I understand it there's some major rework going on because of the architecture changes.
That would imply that MegaUpload was the whole problem, and the problem was now resolved. Yes, they were able to take down MegaUpload using paragraphs designed for the Mafia and things like that (RICO) but that is usually just the tip of the iceberg. If you're talking to a person that argues that piracy must be stomped out, then I'm not going to argue that the existing laws still stop piracy because they won't. Neither would SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and all the king's horses and all the king's men, but it would put every site that allows user uploaded content at risk.
Only big corporations with lots of lawyers like Google will afford to operate a photo/music/video/file sharing site because it can be used for infringing files and that will get you shut down. You don't even get your day in court, boom and your DNS is gone which practically means your site has been banned from the Internet. No rule of law, no due process, it's basically going back a thousand years to before the Magna Carta, but instead of the King you have Hollywood making decisions at a whim. And if he thinks it doesn't apply to him, tell him that yes it will.. because when he's going to share his family photos or home videos those services won't be there because they've been shut down.
Perhaps he does not even fundamentally doesn't understand what he's asking for. They want to shut down your phone carrier because they're not listening to your calls, that's the essence of it. They only want to provide a communication service, but you don't think that's enough. Criminals could use the phone! It's like demanding voice recognition and text analysis to find possible criminal phone calls and forward them to the police, and if they don't well with proof that crimes have been planned on the phone they will get shut down. That's the model they want for the Internet.
3. the E8 is a converted 707...didn't they stop building those in the 1970s? If this is a 30 year old airframe (at best) then either that damage is $25 million or the plane is worth less than $240 million today.
They're probably comparing apples and oranges here, the new cost was $244 million but the planes have been in service of some form since 1991, the accident was in 2009. Secondly, that probably includes a lot of R&D costs so a $25 million dollar could be a much larger part of the production cost. Third, maybe the military's needs have changed or other types of craft do better, it might make sense to operate but not necessarily to spend that much to keep it in service.
Finally, as I understand it this damage was done by a subcontractor. When I use subcontractors, they have liability insurance to cover the systems they're working on, plus potential liabilities. Doesn't the US government require AT LEAST such protections when farming out work to contractors?
They certainly could, but nothing comes free so the government would have to pay higher rates. If you're big enough you may choose to take that risk yourself and use incidents like this in performance evaluations and future negotiations instead.
"Taken away" seems to imply it's been given to somebody else, which is false. The assets have been frozen so they can't spend them, sell them, give them away or transfer them out of the country so that plaintiffs that have been legitimately grieved will get paid after the trial, not unlike the safety deposit on my apartment. It's still my money, it's in my name but I can't empty that account because it's the insurance the landlord has that I have at least some money to pay for damages to the apartment. Otherwise people that think they would lose everything would get rid of all their assets so there'd be nothing to cease.
To use a case people here at /. should be familiar with, for how many years would you like SCO to be able to squander Novell's money before there's a final verdict? You're never going to be able to "take back" wages or operating expenses like these hosting costs, even if it turns out this money was illegally gained - they're lost, because they'll never pay you back. Every expense is another dollar they got to illegally spend of your money. So there's two forms of injustice here, the cease of legal funds and the squander of ill-gotten funds, if you want to suggest a better balance go ahead.
You still require a basic DVD-ROM to even begin to physically read the disk. I don't think that is forced, and certainly not by law. You have a choice of DVD hardware to purchase.
Sure, you can pick the logo on the player but you don't have a choice. To play DVDs it must have a CSS key, to get a CSS key it must follow the CSS license and to play it in any other way would violate the DMCA (or EUCD in Europe or whatever fits your region). It doesn't matter if you've legally bought and own the disc, if you find a way to play it on your own you're a criminal. And because every manufacturer is under the whip of the CSS license, so are you. If they want to enforce region codes or don't want you to fast forward past the commercials they can impose those conditions on the manufacturers through the license who will then impose those restrictions on you. It's not required by law, they've just taken away all other ways of doing it legally - but it works much the same.
Yeah, TPB would be bettter replaced by an .onion site on TOR. I doubt a single site could handle it though since you're limited by your peer bandwidth, but make the main URL a round-robin redirect to other onion sites so you spread the load over many nodes you should be able to create The Pirate Onion. Navigating the site would feel like you're on dial-up but it'd be enough to get to the magnet links and start torrents. And it'd all stay in TOR-land so you wouldn't have any of the exit node issues.
it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
And even detecting and deflecting a potentially Earth-shattering asteroid would probably be easier than any of the other suggestions here. Most of the things that are so destructive they could wipe out life on Earth would probably wipe out a Mars colony too, in space terms it's like building your offsite backup next door. A habitable exoplanet would be the only true redundancy and by nature it'd have to be totally independent too. We just have a few minor details to work out...
Even if that is true, causing waves might not be such a bad thing. First single out Apple, then as they are forced to raise standards to beat the bad PR you can run stories on other companies creating waves in the other direction until all are lifted up a notch. Why Apple? Because right now they're making huge profits, it's a lot easier to argue they can afford it than a competitor that's struggling and running a lot of cost cutting measures to stay afloat. Of course they're not going to stop being profit-seeking, but it's generally expected that there's a trickle-down effect so that working for a profitable company is better than an unprofitable one...
Well, a lot of systems force a normal distribution on everything where the average will get C on an A-F scale, but it's not without side effects. I went to a rather prestigious study, like only the top 5-10% students would be qualified to get in. For classes that we shared with other studies like math classes we'd pretty much all get As and Bs, and the trend mostly stayed in other classes too because it was silly to say this was a D or E grade project even if you were slightly worse than all the other really bright people.
Then in our final year we had one class where they insisted to use the whole scale and distribute us and the results were ridiculous, people that had never ever in their life been below a B grade were getting D, E and even a few F - fail, even if I knew these were extremely bright people who'd know the curriculum intimately. That is not fair either when you get an E and the least worst of the bunch from Yokel University got an A and while there's some prestige to the education institution you went to it doesn't really make up for that.
To get nearer our goal, computers are getting components that are less flexible.
Actually, computers have lost lots of dedicated processing units because it just wasn't worth doing in dedicated hardware, that's where for example softmodems (aka winmodems) came from. And with GPUs going from fixed pipelines to programmable shader units, they too have gone the other way. Dedicated hardware only works if you are doing a large number of exactly defined calculations from a well established standard, like say AES or H.264. Even in a supercomputer the job just isn't static enough, if the researchers have to tweak the algorithm are you going to do build a new computer? You have parameters, but the moment they say "oh and we have to add a new correction factor here" you're totally screwed. Not going to happen.