Here is another way that it might be broken down. Let's say that game market in the US for a certain game is 500 million. That means that 1 million potential customers care about DRM enough not to buy a game. There are many valid reasons for a company is blow off 1 million potential customers, most involving the idea that the chance of turning these potential customers into real customers are minimal, or that these customers will generate excessive costs.
So I can understand why this 99.8% number would tend to support the use of DRM. These customers might be malcontents who would not buy the product anyway. Or might be customers who then turned around and made copies for friends, thus reducing the number of retail sales, that, although might not hurt the developer all that much, will hurt the retail partners.
But I think this is false. Not only can this vocal minority damage a reputation, but this vocal minority could also generate a profit. Unless the gaming industry is like the rest of the entertainment industry and is loathe to show a profit, it would seem that absolute maximum sales are the point. After all, the marginal costs are probably small(packaging and shipping a CD, a bit for support), compared to the price of the unit. At some point a game is nearly all profit. These are mass marketed toys, not vertical market applications. I don't see why sales are not the issue.
Or perhaps it is that each unit generates such obscene profits, that the loss of even a single sale pays the cost of putting the DRM on the entire product line. That certainly would justify the blowing or of.2% of the potential customers.
Look at the current banking crisis. Bankers, realtors, appraisers, all conspiring to convince some gullible idiot that he or she can afford to not only buy a house 3X their yearly income, but said house would become a magic money machine. The ARM mortgage would be no problem because the laws of conservation no longer existed, and the double digit growth in value would continue forever,
and the house could be sold at a profit at any point.
Then there were the gullible idiots who bought the magical risk free packaged investments based on the magical mortgages. These magical financial instruments were another guaranteed trove of never ending money generation.
Of course, like spammers, the only people who made money were the criminals, and, like spammers, should be in jail.
The flaw in your logic is easy money is that only thing that makes people stupid faster than easy sex. Tell people that a magic fairy will give them money, and most will believe it. That is why our presidential candidates primary sources of income, alcohol and gambling, are so lucrative.
I do find the new mackbook pros to be much less durable. While my powerbooks got scratched and such, my Macbook already has a dent in it. Never happened with powerbooks, at least without a fall.
I begun to notice a little flash bug appear in the upper corner of my screen 6-12 months ago. I figure it was the same thing as the more generic 1X1 pixel picture bug. I think it maybe is a google thing. 90% of what flash is used for is ads and pr0n, so as critical as these are to our very existence, I don't envision a massive exodus from flash. Therefore flashback is the only solution, and a mozilla based browser maybe the most expedient option.
In all earnestness, the only reason that flash is so popular is because unlike conventional images, IE and Safari does not have flash control built in. Unlike most media, it is something that is forced on the user through pre installation and push. Of course, Adobe has not felt the need to include a manual start option.
I don't see the MS competitor doing anything different. If history is any indication, MS will make it even more corporate friendly and user hostile than flash. OTOH, I would move to a MS solution is the specs were open like flash(oo.org can export a flash slide presentation), and content did not begin without user request.
I think lack of OS independence and adblock is a critical issue. I would think that Chrome can't really compete in the non IE 30% of the market that is comprised largely of users that (A) have permissions set to install new programs and browse in something that is not IE, (B) know how to install a new browser, (C) are motivated to move from IE and (D) are motivated to take the time to deal with a new application. I am sure a significant percentage of these users are not on MS Windows platforms and those that are move from IE to block ad or, in the case of the Mozilla crowd, have some innate need to pimp their browser.
So Chrome is largely going to attract current IE users that are attracted to the Google brand. But these IE users have stayed with IE even when other options are available. Many of them stay because they do not have the ability to move to another broswer. Many because of the learning curve. I question whether there is a significant number of MS Windows users that care enough to use chrome, or if MS will let them go without a fight.
It is hard to tell the size from the pictures. Fewer ports might indicate another very small macbook pro. As many recall, the missing link is the laptop line is a small pro device. Not much more than 4 lbs, 1 inch thick should be possible with the new tech. The 15" pro is few inches to big a over a pound too heavy.
The reason the debt clock has this problem is because it is sensationalistic and does not give us any real information. What we should be looking at is not the debt, but the debt in relation to some other metric, such as multiple of median income, amount per person, percentage of GDP. Using this later metric, Reagan left us with a debt of about 70% of GDP, Bush will leave us with a debt of 80% of GDP, while Clinton left us with a debt of about 60% of GDP. It is interesting to think that Truman, Ike, Kennedy and even Nixon, all worked to help the US future by reducing the % debt. We even have to give carter so kudos for not increasing it as a % of GDP. The scary thing is that during the great depression GDP fell perhaps 20 or 25%. If this happened in the next few years, our GDP might fall to 9.5 trillion, and we might see a national debt of 110% of GDP. This would be like a family with the median of $50,000 having unsecured debt of $55,0000. How they would pay this off would be extremely unclear.
There are two factors, I believe. One is highway driving where the car quickly reaches cruising velocity and the dominant power consumption, average over time, involves the energy necessary to keep the car at the constant velocity, i.e. overcoming friction. Such driving usually involve reletively constant velocity over a several or even tens of miles Under these highway conditions, there is generally a vertex in which fuel consumption is maximized. In the graph provided by the poster, this speed is between 50 and 60 miles per hour. If one just wants to go fast, and the argument is not about maximum fuel economy, then one can go 70 and the difference is not significant.
But 45 miles per hour does not imply highway driving. It implies driving where the car must stop every mile or so. In this case the energy distribution is different, the dominant term probably being the energy needed to accelerate the car to cruising velocity, which, at 40 miles per hour, with 1 mile stops, occurs perhaps every two minutes. The energy of a car moving with a mass of 'm' moving at 'v' miles per hour is on the order of mv^2. This means that accelerating a car to 45 miles per hour will require twice as much energy as a car that is kept under 35 miles per hour. Now if one is talking about a small car traveling less than 25, and big hemi traveling at 45, then we are talking 4 times as much energy to accelerate the car every few minutes. Of course with a hybrid car some this energy is recovered, but then the rate of acceleration is factor. The faster one accelerates, the less adiabatic the operation, and the less energy is recovered.
So to summerize. In the city, a hemi truck accelerating to 45 miles per hour requires maybe four times as much energy as compact traveling at 30 miles per hour. This energy directly relates to fuel consumption. On the highway where velocity is constant, the domanant factor is merely the energy to overcome friction, which primarily depends on how the engine is constructed and how the shape of the car interacts with the environment. This will probably be slightly different for every car, and every driving style. Thirty years ago it appeared that cars were built to go 80 miles per hour for maximum efficiency. I think it is criminal to drive a Porche slower than that. At the end of the day, for highway driving, it would probably be best to monitor the tachometer for optimal fuel consumption rather the speed. For city driving, slow accelerations with higher speeds only on longer stretches or road.
I don't know where you have seen these, but the results are far from crap. The ABS machines produce very solid and accurate representations of the 3-D model. The celluoid based machines produce accuracte mockup in colors and is faster than the ABS solutions. I have created some detailed and durable objects with the ABS technology.
Both are hugely expensive methods, and are probably one economical form prototypes. I estimated that the cost is a few dollars per cc. It is, however, likely cheaper than creating the prototype by hand.
In any case these printers are widely available for price.
For a group environment, where pretty presentation is paramount over content, MS Office is a very good choice. Nothing is better at writing pretty memos. Nothing is better a writing pretty reports.
However, in many cases, Latex is the better form to write articles, books, etc. Text can be input first, and then formats added later. Sure one does not have the ability to put 10 different fonts on every page, but, again, this is where content rules. Version control and revising is trivially handled though cvs or svn.
Word processors has lead the current generation down a dangerous path of combining content and formating. Let's put the blame where it lies, with MacWord, encouraged people to play with formating and content at the same time. Though there are many advantages to WYSIWG, at least for small documents, it is disastrous for documents of any real size. Though style sheets help, the process does not encourage their use at the end. Therefore a text editor with a post processor still has advantages.
Also remember the drawback of almost all closed source binary products. If one does not have the software, one does not have access to the data. Again,for memos this is no big deal, but for real documents this is a problem. MS Word, Apple Pages, are all proprietary, and though some may claim that the format is open, or the software is free for viewing, it is not as clean a solution as text based markup solutions.
It is wonderful that we have a native intel Mac OS X version(I know the neooffice people try, but it has not been stable for me). Thanks to the developers. My question is will there continue to be an X windows build for PPC macs. The PPC macs still have a good year or two years left in them, given that we will not see snow leopard for 12-18 months. It would be nice to have a version of OO.org to run them.
Such licensing would solve many problems, but the idea that the cost would be minimal is not supported by evidence. In fact we can look at commercial licensing and see that the cost is often prohibitive. In addition to the number of television shows that cannot be released on DVD, two other specific examples come to mind. First the german movie Lola Rennt, according to the audio commentary, was going to use an Elvis tune. The cost was extraordinary, so another song was used. Second, In Buffy Whedon used unsigned bands. His justification was that these were the bands that would play in the fictional "Bronze", but it also saved a huge amount in licensing fees and probably allowed the DVDs to be released at a much lower cost.
It is clear that the copyright holders would rather kill the market than reform licensing. We see this with the initial waste of effort with DRM, and the instance that a clip, no matter how short, cannot be used without paying a fee, even if the use generates no direct profit. In the scenario described by the parent post, for example, the fee for the song would be at least a couple hundred dollars.
The best thing we can do is fight the fiscal liberals who wish to use taxpayer money to protect their private property by unreasonably extending copyrights. Really, anything that is 50 years old should be public domain, without exception. If profit has not been made, too bad. For instance, it is going to be pretty stupid for 2020 to roll around and Michael Jackson or whoever to still be making money off the Beatles. Such a policy simply destroys innovation and creativity.
I was taught, and teach others, in the fundamentals. This means that I understand what is going on, and not just what to do to get a the proper response. So here are my thoughts.
Start off without a computer. At the basis, computers are sequential, even if some other from is used in the programming. Students must be able to break processes down into steps. They will invariable create ambiguous steps or leave steps out. Act out the process to show the missing steps. Use humor show undesired outcomes. Kids tend not to fully comprehend cause and effect, sequential logic, and the like. They tend to want to told a process, then apply the process mindlessly. The creativity and flexibility at the basis of programming a computer must be taught. At this point language only limits the students options, so it is not necessary to worry about that yet.
Second, the student must understand the limitation of a computer, and how they function. A sideline into binary math and boolean algebra is useful to teach these limitation, and get the student to think on this detail. If an AOI circuit simulator is available, this can be used to teach these limitations, as well as get the students used to using the computer in a product creation manner.
This last bit is important, because many students have never used a computer to create anything significant, and don't really understand that this is what many professionals do. They know how to use proxies to bypass security, but not how to load an IDE to create a program. Many can't even comprehend it, and play with their proxies not understanding that there is something else they could be doing.
This is a bit abstract, but computers do work in the abstract, which is why CS majors, and scientists, engineers, and math people tend to earn a premium. Such people can think in the abstract, and they can not only because of innate ability, but because they were taught to. Teachers that shy away from the abstract because the kids complain and it is easier not to are leaving out a part of the educational process. But use concrete examples to keep the abstract grounded in something the students can relate to.
At this point, when everyone is familiar with the computer function, some time can be spent detail the general workings and components of the computer. I have seen children as young as 9 forced to memorize, rote, the names of each part of the computer, and match the name to the part. I have seen high school kids repair computers with a high level knowledge, not quite knowing how everything really fits together. I don't know what level of detail is necessary for computer programming. They should now what a computer is, but I would not formally assess or punish the lack of rote memorization.
At this point, it depends on what is to be taught. Something like Alice can teach OO concepts in a very accessible and high level manner. Since most everything is moving towards using a high level API with short bits of glue code, this may not be such a bad choice.
If actually programming is to be taught, I would not use an overly complex IDE or language. The basics need to be taught. for instance, to switch values i=j; j=i does not work. Variable scope is important. How one passes parameters is important. Global variable can be very bad. That sort of thing.
At higher level, creating reliable contained data structures is always a fun topic. Write a web engine or a word processor is now a well known problem and can be handled in a year. If there is a science or math component, well formed solutions to such problems are also quite instructive.
A key thing that is often missed in debugging. Give students time to debug their work. Don't cave to the crying. Let them help each other. Assessment is best done in their ability to fix a bug, rather than sketch out a section of code or a data structure.
And of course project based and group learning is the soup du jour. As mentioned, it is possible to have the students write a si
If I understand this correctly, this applies to commercial business partners. All that will happen is business partners that no longer find value in the relationship will leave. The analogy would be mass marketers moving from the post office to email (spam).
I do not see how verizon could bill an arbitrary commercial interest to send a message to a customer on it's network. Even if they did identify the interest, there would be no contract established, so even though they could bill, it is unclear if they could collect. it would be more likely that verizon would get sued for mail fraud. It is like the sigs on some of the posts that read 'by reading this post you agree to pay me $10", except that the sig seems to have some basis in what some software vendors consider law.
SMS is a profit center and it seems reasonable to push that profit center by asking partners to pay more. It seems reasonable to the consumer because such commercials interests might keep their lists up to date to make sure they are not sending messages to people who do not want them. The only people it will hurt are the commercial content providers, who may find that the promotional agreement with verizon does not have any value. I decided many years ago that Verizon provided me, the customer, with no value.
One advantage to built in rechargeable batteries is that the user will not just throw the old batteries away. If the manufacturer replaces them, then we have some assurance that they will be disposed of properly. This benefit does not outweigh all the disadvantages, but there you are. In my metropolitan area, electronics recycling is pain. Only two locations, neither of them convenient in location of hours. The unstaffed locations do not accept things like batteries or electronics.
As far as extended warranty programs, most are a rip off. The apple programs, however, at least on the pro laptops and the iphone, have shown value to me. These are expensive pieces of gear, and even 20% over a few years is not out of line. It takes care of the battery, and any damage. When you consider that ATT will charge you $175 in the US to break a contract, the $69 applecare is put into perspective, though it does not cover loss.
In general I would hate to see laws that required or forbade removable batteries. What I would like to see is more retailers forced to take back electronics that they sell, perhaps with a small discount if you buy an equivalent device. Straight money back might encourage theft. Non replaceable batteries are not an environmental problem, they are an engineering decision and customer preference. The envronmental problem is that consumers throw batteries and electronics away because there is no easy way to dispose of them properly.
I think the level of personal privacy varies by the person, and it is a tradeoff. Are the real and opportunity costs of privacy countermanded by some tangible benefits. For the average person probably not, but what happens when the situation changes. Look at Palin and her Yahoo account.
Privacy concerns, to me, are a poor primary rationale to do something. For instance, it makes sense to use Google or even Yahoo if you can tolerate a low level of service, especially with the free service. A day or so ago there was a article in the NYT whining about how google does not have customer service for their free mail accounts, and how one might be locked out their account for weeks if something goes wrong. I respond to that by saying how valuable is the email if the service chosen is a free one, even if it is ad supported. Even for $50 bucks a year one cannot expect a high level of service. Therefore I choose not to use google as a primary account due to service concerns, though I do have an account.
I also think that privacy is relative to wider society. We no longer have an expectation of privacy when we hold a conversation in public. We don't have the expectation of phone privacy we used to. Email of course is not all that private, chat lees so. I would sign up for all the chat service since so many people, even business, use them. I see no reason for free mail unless there is a financial reason. Or get friends that don't use this stuff.
I am tired of artists complaining that it is all the labels faults. Did Radiohead not cave into the labels in hopes of fame and making money, or did they just think the new name would be more 'artistic'. Did the band join EMI for free, or did not EMI pay them a sum of money in exchange for doing what EMI wanted. Do artist trade creative control for up front payment, or is that more indicative of a business in which the purpose is to make money, not art. Reportable Radiohead demanded 10 million pounds before they were willing to continue their art, and changed labels in hopes of getting that money.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but be honest. Whether a label gets the money, or performer, or the drug dealer, ultimately gets the money makes no difference. They are all after the same thing, maximizing profits. The label deserves significant profit because they are the ones promoting the performer and providing the upfront capital. The sell out performer, or 'artist', deserves some profit because they provide the raw material. The drug dealer deserves some profit because they provide a necessary product.
In any case, once yo sell yourself I don't see much room for moral arguments about art. I respect honest people, like the late Robert Heinlein, who provided excellent entertainment, but never pretended his work was anything else than it was. He wrote to make money, he wrote for a market, and if one publisher would not buy his work, he would move to another. He did not cry like a whiny child that he had to work to make his money. No one is putting a gun to these 'artists' heads making the accept the offers from the labels. They could just go out and be artists, if they would give up the money. I buy all sorts of music like that, for instance if that's entertainment
One of parents job is to slowly expose children to the world as the child is able to understand it. This is much better than limiting the behavior of all adults. For example, some might want to ban alcohol from any venue that a child might attend. This makes sense if the venue is primarily for children, but doesn't make sense if it is primarily adult, where parent can model responsible drinking rather than have the child's first experience at a high school kegger.
For the internet the same is true. It is much better to give parent control of what and when the child can access certain content rather than limit content to that which is appropriate for a 12 year old. This is not censorship in the conventional sense as the content is available. A motivated child can leave the house and gain acess. Rather this is a little thing called parenting, which many around here might say is something way under practiced.
One thinks that this is only a problem for two groups. First, teenagers who either do not have a means to get out of the house of out of school, for instance rural or homeschool kids, to unfiltered computers. Second, adults who live in the parents basements and do not pay rent or pay for their own phone/cable and computer. Otherwise, such technologies are merely part of rearing a child.
This problem goes beyond Apple. It is the way the cell phone industry works in the US. The carriers collude with the cell phone manufacturers to create specifically designed phones that limit user choice and competition. This is shown in the instance of iPhone where Apple went to every cell carrier asking them if Apple could design a phone that be user centered, and only ATT allowed them to do so. It is also shown in the case of Android, where T-Mobile, the bottom of the cell phone food chain, is the only company in the US that sells the phone. If one doubts the existance of this collusion, just compare the original razr as produced in the Europe, the US, and between the US carriers.
A long time ago the original ATT used the same arguments that the cell phone companies are using now. It is dangerous to allow third party kit on our lines. We have to charge exorbitant rental fees to our customer to cover costs. Fortunately these claims were eventually smacked down. If they were not, we would not have been able to put affordable modems on our computers, and the internet would be controlled by ATT.
I think this is an important case in testing the ability of cell phone companies to collude to limit customer options. I do not believe that attacking Apple is going to solve the fundamental problem. I see no reason why, if the cell phone carriers were open, that the iPhone could not be sold by any carrier. It is the behavior of the American cell companies, not the hardware designers, that is the issue.
I would love to pay $2000 or less for a high performance laptop but I don't like the fact that I have to pay for Vista when Autodesk software prefers XP, the fact that every time I plug in a USB drive or a camera it wastes time trying to load a device driver rather than just mounting it as a generic external volume, that I have to run AVG, Adaware, and Spybot periodically to make sure that nothing nasty has gotten on the machine, and that the there is conflict in the Java system between MS and Sun, which means that sometimes some my visualization apps don't work. Not to mention general lack of a Firewire 800 port for my external hard disks. And that the cheaper machine is a little heavier and much bigger.
So, since I know what I need, I buy an Apple, add XP to it, and go on my merry way.
There was a time when everyone had niche application, and it ran on Unix. Then everyone, for a brief time, had a niche application, and it ran on Apple. Now everyone has a niche application that runs on Windows. This was true for small and medium business.
The real issue here is running on a single platform. Just because the engineering department needs $5000 machines running windows and Autodesk(I run autodesk software. I have powerful machines for the real work, and a macbook pro for home use), does that mean everyone in the office does? Certainly, one would not say everyone is going to have a $5000 machine, so why Windows? You can argue exchange, but exchange is a solution to a problem, not the only solution to a problem. Ultimately this solution, which is CPU and management intensive, is going to be replaced by a better one, and MS has no incentive to crate it. As far a quickbooks, office spplications, etc, these either have comparable products on Linux, or emerging solutions that are OS independent.
No, the issue is not applications. The issue is MS site licensing. If once wants to site license, then it is customary to license all machines, even if they do not run MS software. And if you pay for it, you might as well use it. MS keeps the corporate license cheap enough to keep companies from fleeing, which means the common person is not exposed to other, maybe better, solutions.
My main worry about these netbooks is video decoding. I have had trouble decoding flash video on a few years old. The same holds true for the HD like movies with DRM. I know that the primary use of these machines is not to watch video, but you know it will become a dominant use. The net book makers should learn from the mistakes Apple made in the late 90's and the class action lawsuits from the DVD player that almost worked.
There is no more evidence that the free market works than pacifist stance is the best for freedom and democracy. The fact that we in the US tend to believe in the myth of the free market, and not pacifism, to me is quite ironic, as both as based on the treatment of people as idealized agents. What one goes further to the invisible hand, one enters the world of fairy tales and denial of reality, almost to the point of the insane asylum.
What we have seen over the past 30 years is political use of the free market to depress the middle class, while the disregard of the free market to create an increasingly wealthy aristocracy. Under Reagan this was done through defense spending, which increased debt. This made capital less available to people who were not already rich, and put a tax burden on future generations. While is true that the income tax in the US is quite progressive in principle, it tend to leave the middle class with minimal expendable income which they can invest and grow their assets beyond a retirement account. A high government debt requires higher taxes where fiscal conservatism would require lower overall taxes.
Bush has done four things to distort the free market. First he started a war which moved able bodied workers out fo the job market. This meant that there was no pressure to create new jobs. He also expanded government with the DHS, which further disrupted the free market by removing workers and often silly new regulation on industry, thus making the US much less competitive worldwide. Second, he borrowed heavily for the war, likely to the order of a trillion dollars. This continued the Reagan method to minimize movement to the aristocracy. Of course some of this was counteracted with the engineered housing bubble, which gave the middle class short term assets, wich of course are now disappearing. Third, he rewrote the bankruptcy laws preventing the middle class from starting over when economic forces beyond their control cause a financial breakdown. Bankruptcy laws cause irresponsible lenders out of business while rewarding responsible lenders. The change in bankruptcy laws were instrumental to the current fiscal crisis in which banks were safe to make irresponsible loans knowing that bankruptcy, in many cases, would not be an option. The free market is distorted by protecting the fiscally irresponsible owners, and by encouraging fiscally irresponsible loans. The fourth is the bill just passed. Another trillion dollars borrowed from future generations. Sure, some it may be paid back, but unless we are talking a total payback of 2 trillion dollars over the next 20-30 years, the taxpayer lost money. The bid by Wells Fargo proves that the free market did not need this deal.
To be sure the deal is going to save some penthouse on Park Avenue, just like DHS made a few government officials very rich. it will save some retirement accounts. But long term it will encourage irresponsible fiscal liberalism that lead to this mess. It would be far better to trust fiscal conservative values and punish irresponsible lenders by letting the be bought out for pennies on the dollar, and rewriting mortgages so that homeowners are left in their home, while home investors are equally punished for bad investments. The government can take control of the few assets that can't be marketed, but this socialist plan to make the government into a fortune 100 bank overnight is madness.
On a side note, the free market and democracy may not be compatible. China has made the best use of the free market. They are destroying their natural resources at an incredible rate, but the ability to ignore the whining of the peasants is of great benefit.
MS is supposed to superior because it is not tied to a particular hardware, and has many programs to allow an average person to be trained in development and support. These people can then go out into the market and make a living supporting MS products. THe issue is of course is that when depends on MS products, one also depends on MS developing new products that grow the market. In this case we see that vista should have been a boon for developers and support people. But no, MS still gets the licensing fees, but support personnel do not get employed upgrading the machines. On the other hand, businesses do not want to spend money and disrupt business simply because MS needs to increase profits
This is why I think single source is bad for business, and why *nix is a good option for worker drone machines that do not require specific applications. It is not like support persons cannot learn basic *nix, and users cannot learn OO.org instead of MS Office. I know there are some MS Exchange issues, but those are going away. What does the average lose when they move to *nix? The ability to change a background on the desktop with one click? The ability to download and play games? Sure flash may not work perfectly, but that is not a long term detterent.
This is really why we can't get control of the energy issues in the US, even though we had some good ideas over 30 years ago.
First, it is not reasonable to focus on a single source for power. Deploying multiple means of power generation just makes sense. Water, wind solar, why not? It may be asked where to put the solar or wind. Well, there are certainly public lands available for such things, and the US can certainly use imminent domain to acquire more. We allow the lumber industry and the oil industry to exploit public lands, why not solar? Sure it may not be a solution yet, but when a market is created, innovative solutions will follow. and sure there are always environmental issues, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but that is why we call these renewable, and only the market droids and fanatics call it clean.
As far as nuclear goes, yes it is a good solution. But there are political issues. Primarily many utilities were not able to pay for the first round of nuclear generators through normal rates. They had to go to the government to allow then to force the people to pay for the plants. Given that utilities are demanded huge incentives from the government to build new nuclear plants, many think they are up to their old games. Given that nuclear was not always able to pay for itself in the first place, and that utilities are not willing to build plants now without government handouts, it is not unreasonable to infer that nuclear is not a cost effective solution. Furthermore, without reprocessing, another political decision, it is a fact that nuclear is not cost effective, at least in the US. The world wide trend suggests that nuclear is only cost effective in country with a high overall population density and extremely limited access to other fuels. This is mostly in europe, with the suggestive exception of switzerland. In the end, the reason we don't have nuclear is the same reason we don't have solar or wind. The oil and coal interests are just too powerful, and the cost to develop alternatives simply represent a long term cost we are not willing to make.
So we get to the issue of cars. The issue of cars is not simply how clean they are. The issue with cars is a broader economic issue. For better or worse, mnay parts of the US are dependent on cars, and, for better or worse, full economic activity depends on many individuals driving over 100 miles a day. Economics agents being fundamentally irrational, many chose cars that consume ten gallons or more a day under such conditions. This is fine until such use consumes in excess of 3 or 4% of income. This is the problem in addition to clean air. Consumer living beyond their means. Although economist in the 90's thought that $25 a barrel was going to last forever, economists are not scientists. At this price it was unlikely that serious exploration would go on, and unlikely that serious extraction would go on, meaning we were limited to existing cheap reserves. This meant mostly in the middle east. At higher prices we can get more oil, but Americans are not willing to pay that much long term. The fact that india and china and europe are is likely to make the US preference unimportant. Therefore cars need to use alternative fuels that are in the $1 per 10 mile range. Electricity may or may not be it given that one might need 30-50 KWH to run a car for that distance. But given that coal is more available in the US than oil, and so it sun and wind, it will free us from competing for oil which we are not willing to pay a premium, and allow us to develop local oil fields for export to balance our trade numbers.
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So I can understand why this 99.8% number would tend to support the use of DRM. These customers might be malcontents who would not buy the product anyway. Or might be customers who then turned around and made copies for friends, thus reducing the number of retail sales, that, although might not hurt the developer all that much, will hurt the retail partners.
But I think this is false. Not only can this vocal minority damage a reputation, but this vocal minority could also generate a profit. Unless the gaming industry is like the rest of the entertainment industry and is loathe to show a profit, it would seem that absolute maximum sales are the point. After all, the marginal costs are probably small(packaging and shipping a CD, a bit for support), compared to the price of the unit. At some point a game is nearly all profit. These are mass marketed toys, not vertical market applications. I don't see why sales are not the issue.
Or perhaps it is that each unit generates such obscene profits, that the loss of even a single sale pays the cost of putting the DRM on the entire product line. That certainly would justify the blowing or of .2% of the potential customers.
Look at the current banking crisis. Bankers, realtors, appraisers, all conspiring to convince some gullible idiot that he or she can afford to not only buy a house 3X their yearly income, but said house would become a magic money machine. The ARM mortgage would be no problem because the laws of conservation no longer existed, and the double digit growth in value would continue forever, and the house could be sold at a profit at any point.
Then there were the gullible idiots who bought the magical risk free packaged investments based on the magical mortgages. These magical financial instruments were another guaranteed trove of never ending money generation.
Of course, like spammers, the only people who made money were the criminals, and, like spammers, should be in jail.
The flaw in your logic is easy money is that only thing that makes people stupid faster than easy sex. Tell people that a magic fairy will give them money, and most will believe it. That is why our presidential candidates primary sources of income, alcohol and gambling, are so lucrative.
I do find the new mackbook pros to be much less durable. While my powerbooks got scratched and such, my Macbook already has a dent in it. Never happened with powerbooks, at least without a fall.
In all earnestness, the only reason that flash is so popular is because unlike conventional images, IE and Safari does not have flash control built in. Unlike most media, it is something that is forced on the user through pre installation and push. Of course, Adobe has not felt the need to include a manual start option.
I don't see the MS competitor doing anything different. If history is any indication, MS will make it even more corporate friendly and user hostile than flash. OTOH, I would move to a MS solution is the specs were open like flash(oo.org can export a flash slide presentation), and content did not begin without user request.
So Chrome is largely going to attract current IE users that are attracted to the Google brand. But these IE users have stayed with IE even when other options are available. Many of them stay because they do not have the ability to move to another broswer. Many because of the learning curve. I question whether there is a significant number of MS Windows users that care enough to use chrome, or if MS will let them go without a fight.
It is hard to tell the size from the pictures. Fewer ports might indicate another very small macbook pro. As many recall, the missing link is the laptop line is a small pro device. Not much more than 4 lbs, 1 inch thick should be possible with the new tech. The 15" pro is few inches to big a over a pound too heavy.
The reason the debt clock has this problem is because it is sensationalistic and does not give us any real information. What we should be looking at is not the debt, but the debt in relation to some other metric, such as multiple of median income, amount per person, percentage of GDP. Using this later metric, Reagan left us with a debt of about 70% of GDP, Bush will leave us with a debt of 80% of GDP, while Clinton left us with a debt of about 60% of GDP. It is interesting to think that Truman, Ike, Kennedy and even Nixon, all worked to help the US future by reducing the % debt. We even have to give carter so kudos for not increasing it as a % of GDP. The scary thing is that during the great depression GDP fell perhaps 20 or 25%. If this happened in the next few years, our GDP might fall to 9.5 trillion, and we might see a national debt of 110% of GDP. This would be like a family with the median of $50,000 having unsecured debt of $55,0000. How they would pay this off would be extremely unclear.
But 45 miles per hour does not imply highway driving. It implies driving where the car must stop every mile or so. In this case the energy distribution is different, the dominant term probably being the energy needed to accelerate the car to cruising velocity, which, at 40 miles per hour, with 1 mile stops, occurs perhaps every two minutes. The energy of a car moving with a mass of 'm' moving at 'v' miles per hour is on the order of mv^2. This means that accelerating a car to 45 miles per hour will require twice as much energy as a car that is kept under 35 miles per hour. Now if one is talking about a small car traveling less than 25, and big hemi traveling at 45, then we are talking 4 times as much energy to accelerate the car every few minutes. Of course with a hybrid car some this energy is recovered, but then the rate of acceleration is factor. The faster one accelerates, the less adiabatic the operation, and the less energy is recovered.
So to summerize. In the city, a hemi truck accelerating to 45 miles per hour requires maybe four times as much energy as compact traveling at 30 miles per hour. This energy directly relates to fuel consumption. On the highway where velocity is constant, the domanant factor is merely the energy to overcome friction, which primarily depends on how the engine is constructed and how the shape of the car interacts with the environment. This will probably be slightly different for every car, and every driving style. Thirty years ago it appeared that cars were built to go 80 miles per hour for maximum efficiency. I think it is criminal to drive a Porche slower than that. At the end of the day, for highway driving, it would probably be best to monitor the tachometer for optimal fuel consumption rather the speed. For city driving, slow accelerations with higher speeds only on longer stretches or road.
Both are hugely expensive methods, and are probably one economical form prototypes. I estimated that the cost is a few dollars per cc. It is, however, likely cheaper than creating the prototype by hand.
In any case these printers are widely available for price.
However, in many cases, Latex is the better form to write articles, books, etc. Text can be input first, and then formats added later. Sure one does not have the ability to put 10 different fonts on every page, but, again, this is where content rules. Version control and revising is trivially handled though cvs or svn.
Word processors has lead the current generation down a dangerous path of combining content and formating. Let's put the blame where it lies, with MacWord, encouraged people to play with formating and content at the same time. Though there are many advantages to WYSIWG, at least for small documents, it is disastrous for documents of any real size. Though style sheets help, the process does not encourage their use at the end. Therefore a text editor with a post processor still has advantages.
Also remember the drawback of almost all closed source binary products. If one does not have the software, one does not have access to the data. Again,for memos this is no big deal, but for real documents this is a problem. MS Word, Apple Pages, are all proprietary, and though some may claim that the format is open, or the software is free for viewing, it is not as clean a solution as text based markup solutions.
It is wonderful that we have a native intel Mac OS X version(I know the neooffice people try, but it has not been stable for me). Thanks to the developers. My question is will there continue to be an X windows build for PPC macs. The PPC macs still have a good year or two years left in them, given that we will not see snow leopard for 12-18 months. It would be nice to have a version of OO.org to run them.
It is clear that the copyright holders would rather kill the market than reform licensing. We see this with the initial waste of effort with DRM, and the instance that a clip, no matter how short, cannot be used without paying a fee, even if the use generates no direct profit. In the scenario described by the parent post, for example, the fee for the song would be at least a couple hundred dollars.
The best thing we can do is fight the fiscal liberals who wish to use taxpayer money to protect their private property by unreasonably extending copyrights. Really, anything that is 50 years old should be public domain, without exception. If profit has not been made, too bad. For instance, it is going to be pretty stupid for 2020 to roll around and Michael Jackson or whoever to still be making money off the Beatles. Such a policy simply destroys innovation and creativity.
Start off without a computer. At the basis, computers are sequential, even if some other from is used in the programming. Students must be able to break processes down into steps. They will invariable create ambiguous steps or leave steps out. Act out the process to show the missing steps. Use humor show undesired outcomes. Kids tend not to fully comprehend cause and effect, sequential logic, and the like. They tend to want to told a process, then apply the process mindlessly. The creativity and flexibility at the basis of programming a computer must be taught. At this point language only limits the students options, so it is not necessary to worry about that yet.
Second, the student must understand the limitation of a computer, and how they function. A sideline into binary math and boolean algebra is useful to teach these limitation, and get the student to think on this detail. If an AOI circuit simulator is available, this can be used to teach these limitations, as well as get the students used to using the computer in a product creation manner. This last bit is important, because many students have never used a computer to create anything significant, and don't really understand that this is what many professionals do. They know how to use proxies to bypass security, but not how to load an IDE to create a program. Many can't even comprehend it, and play with their proxies not understanding that there is something else they could be doing.
This is a bit abstract, but computers do work in the abstract, which is why CS majors, and scientists, engineers, and math people tend to earn a premium. Such people can think in the abstract, and they can not only because of innate ability, but because they were taught to. Teachers that shy away from the abstract because the kids complain and it is easier not to are leaving out a part of the educational process. But use concrete examples to keep the abstract grounded in something the students can relate to.
At this point, when everyone is familiar with the computer function, some time can be spent detail the general workings and components of the computer. I have seen children as young as 9 forced to memorize, rote, the names of each part of the computer, and match the name to the part. I have seen high school kids repair computers with a high level knowledge, not quite knowing how everything really fits together. I don't know what level of detail is necessary for computer programming. They should now what a computer is, but I would not formally assess or punish the lack of rote memorization.
At this point, it depends on what is to be taught. Something like Alice can teach OO concepts in a very accessible and high level manner. Since most everything is moving towards using a high level API with short bits of glue code, this may not be such a bad choice.
If actually programming is to be taught, I would not use an overly complex IDE or language. The basics need to be taught. for instance, to switch values i=j; j=i does not work. Variable scope is important. How one passes parameters is important. Global variable can be very bad. That sort of thing.
At higher level, creating reliable contained data structures is always a fun topic. Write a web engine or a word processor is now a well known problem and can be handled in a year. If there is a science or math component, well formed solutions to such problems are also quite instructive.
A key thing that is often missed in debugging. Give students time to debug their work. Don't cave to the crying. Let them help each other. Assessment is best done in their ability to fix a bug, rather than sketch out a section of code or a data structure.
And of course project based and group learning is the soup du jour. As mentioned, it is possible to have the students write a si
I do not see how verizon could bill an arbitrary commercial interest to send a message to a customer on it's network. Even if they did identify the interest, there would be no contract established, so even though they could bill, it is unclear if they could collect. it would be more likely that verizon would get sued for mail fraud. It is like the sigs on some of the posts that read 'by reading this post you agree to pay me $10", except that the sig seems to have some basis in what some software vendors consider law.
SMS is a profit center and it seems reasonable to push that profit center by asking partners to pay more. It seems reasonable to the consumer because such commercials interests might keep their lists up to date to make sure they are not sending messages to people who do not want them. The only people it will hurt are the commercial content providers, who may find that the promotional agreement with verizon does not have any value. I decided many years ago that Verizon provided me, the customer, with no value.
As far as extended warranty programs, most are a rip off. The apple programs, however, at least on the pro laptops and the iphone, have shown value to me. These are expensive pieces of gear, and even 20% over a few years is not out of line. It takes care of the battery, and any damage. When you consider that ATT will charge you $175 in the US to break a contract, the $69 applecare is put into perspective, though it does not cover loss.
In general I would hate to see laws that required or forbade removable batteries. What I would like to see is more retailers forced to take back electronics that they sell, perhaps with a small discount if you buy an equivalent device. Straight money back might encourage theft. Non replaceable batteries are not an environmental problem, they are an engineering decision and customer preference. The envronmental problem is that consumers throw batteries and electronics away because there is no easy way to dispose of them properly.
Privacy concerns, to me, are a poor primary rationale to do something. For instance, it makes sense to use Google or even Yahoo if you can tolerate a low level of service, especially with the free service. A day or so ago there was a article in the NYT whining about how google does not have customer service for their free mail accounts, and how one might be locked out their account for weeks if something goes wrong. I respond to that by saying how valuable is the email if the service chosen is a free one, even if it is ad supported. Even for $50 bucks a year one cannot expect a high level of service. Therefore I choose not to use google as a primary account due to service concerns, though I do have an account.
I also think that privacy is relative to wider society. We no longer have an expectation of privacy when we hold a conversation in public. We don't have the expectation of phone privacy we used to. Email of course is not all that private, chat lees so. I would sign up for all the chat service since so many people, even business, use them. I see no reason for free mail unless there is a financial reason. Or get friends that don't use this stuff.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but be honest. Whether a label gets the money, or performer, or the drug dealer, ultimately gets the money makes no difference. They are all after the same thing, maximizing profits. The label deserves significant profit because they are the ones promoting the performer and providing the upfront capital. The sell out performer, or 'artist', deserves some profit because they provide the raw material. The drug dealer deserves some profit because they provide a necessary product.
In any case, once yo sell yourself I don't see much room for moral arguments about art. I respect honest people, like the late Robert Heinlein, who provided excellent entertainment, but never pretended his work was anything else than it was. He wrote to make money, he wrote for a market, and if one publisher would not buy his work, he would move to another. He did not cry like a whiny child that he had to work to make his money. No one is putting a gun to these 'artists' heads making the accept the offers from the labels. They could just go out and be artists, if they would give up the money. I buy all sorts of music like that, for instance if that's entertainment
For the internet the same is true. It is much better to give parent control of what and when the child can access certain content rather than limit content to that which is appropriate for a 12 year old. This is not censorship in the conventional sense as the content is available. A motivated child can leave the house and gain acess. Rather this is a little thing called parenting, which many around here might say is something way under practiced.
One thinks that this is only a problem for two groups. First, teenagers who either do not have a means to get out of the house of out of school, for instance rural or homeschool kids, to unfiltered computers. Second, adults who live in the parents basements and do not pay rent or pay for their own phone/cable and computer. Otherwise, such technologies are merely part of rearing a child.
A long time ago the original ATT used the same arguments that the cell phone companies are using now. It is dangerous to allow third party kit on our lines. We have to charge exorbitant rental fees to our customer to cover costs. Fortunately these claims were eventually smacked down. If they were not, we would not have been able to put affordable modems on our computers, and the internet would be controlled by ATT.
I think this is an important case in testing the ability of cell phone companies to collude to limit customer options. I do not believe that attacking Apple is going to solve the fundamental problem. I see no reason why, if the cell phone carriers were open, that the iPhone could not be sold by any carrier. It is the behavior of the American cell companies, not the hardware designers, that is the issue.
So, since I know what I need, I buy an Apple, add XP to it, and go on my merry way.
The real issue here is running on a single platform. Just because the engineering department needs $5000 machines running windows and Autodesk(I run autodesk software. I have powerful machines for the real work, and a macbook pro for home use), does that mean everyone in the office does? Certainly, one would not say everyone is going to have a $5000 machine, so why Windows? You can argue exchange, but exchange is a solution to a problem, not the only solution to a problem. Ultimately this solution, which is CPU and management intensive, is going to be replaced by a better one, and MS has no incentive to crate it. As far a quickbooks, office spplications, etc, these either have comparable products on Linux, or emerging solutions that are OS independent.
No, the issue is not applications. The issue is MS site licensing. If once wants to site license, then it is customary to license all machines, even if they do not run MS software. And if you pay for it, you might as well use it. MS keeps the corporate license cheap enough to keep companies from fleeing, which means the common person is not exposed to other, maybe better, solutions.
My main worry about these netbooks is video decoding. I have had trouble decoding flash video on a few years old. The same holds true for the HD like movies with DRM. I know that the primary use of these machines is not to watch video, but you know it will become a dominant use. The net book makers should learn from the mistakes Apple made in the late 90's and the class action lawsuits from the DVD player that almost worked.
What we have seen over the past 30 years is political use of the free market to depress the middle class, while the disregard of the free market to create an increasingly wealthy aristocracy. Under Reagan this was done through defense spending, which increased debt. This made capital less available to people who were not already rich, and put a tax burden on future generations. While is true that the income tax in the US is quite progressive in principle, it tend to leave the middle class with minimal expendable income which they can invest and grow their assets beyond a retirement account. A high government debt requires higher taxes where fiscal conservatism would require lower overall taxes.
Bush has done four things to distort the free market. First he started a war which moved able bodied workers out fo the job market. This meant that there was no pressure to create new jobs. He also expanded government with the DHS, which further disrupted the free market by removing workers and often silly new regulation on industry, thus making the US much less competitive worldwide. Second, he borrowed heavily for the war, likely to the order of a trillion dollars. This continued the Reagan method to minimize movement to the aristocracy. Of course some of this was counteracted with the engineered housing bubble, which gave the middle class short term assets, wich of course are now disappearing. Third, he rewrote the bankruptcy laws preventing the middle class from starting over when economic forces beyond their control cause a financial breakdown. Bankruptcy laws cause irresponsible lenders out of business while rewarding responsible lenders. The change in bankruptcy laws were instrumental to the current fiscal crisis in which banks were safe to make irresponsible loans knowing that bankruptcy, in many cases, would not be an option. The free market is distorted by protecting the fiscally irresponsible owners, and by encouraging fiscally irresponsible loans. The fourth is the bill just passed. Another trillion dollars borrowed from future generations. Sure, some it may be paid back, but unless we are talking a total payback of 2 trillion dollars over the next 20-30 years, the taxpayer lost money. The bid by Wells Fargo proves that the free market did not need this deal.
To be sure the deal is going to save some penthouse on Park Avenue, just like DHS made a few government officials very rich. it will save some retirement accounts. But long term it will encourage irresponsible fiscal liberalism that lead to this mess. It would be far better to trust fiscal conservative values and punish irresponsible lenders by letting the be bought out for pennies on the dollar, and rewriting mortgages so that homeowners are left in their home, while home investors are equally punished for bad investments. The government can take control of the few assets that can't be marketed, but this socialist plan to make the government into a fortune 100 bank overnight is madness.
On a side note, the free market and democracy may not be compatible. China has made the best use of the free market. They are destroying their natural resources at an incredible rate, but the ability to ignore the whining of the peasants is of great benefit.
This is why I think single source is bad for business, and why *nix is a good option for worker drone machines that do not require specific applications. It is not like support persons cannot learn basic *nix, and users cannot learn OO.org instead of MS Office. I know there are some MS Exchange issues, but those are going away. What does the average lose when they move to *nix? The ability to change a background on the desktop with one click? The ability to download and play games? Sure flash may not work perfectly, but that is not a long term detterent.
First, it is not reasonable to focus on a single source for power. Deploying multiple means of power generation just makes sense. Water, wind solar, why not? It may be asked where to put the solar or wind. Well, there are certainly public lands available for such things, and the US can certainly use imminent domain to acquire more. We allow the lumber industry and the oil industry to exploit public lands, why not solar? Sure it may not be a solution yet, but when a market is created, innovative solutions will follow. and sure there are always environmental issues, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but that is why we call these renewable, and only the market droids and fanatics call it clean.
As far as nuclear goes, yes it is a good solution. But there are political issues. Primarily many utilities were not able to pay for the first round of nuclear generators through normal rates. They had to go to the government to allow then to force the people to pay for the plants. Given that utilities are demanded huge incentives from the government to build new nuclear plants, many think they are up to their old games. Given that nuclear was not always able to pay for itself in the first place, and that utilities are not willing to build plants now without government handouts, it is not unreasonable to infer that nuclear is not a cost effective solution. Furthermore, without reprocessing, another political decision, it is a fact that nuclear is not cost effective, at least in the US. The world wide trend suggests that nuclear is only cost effective in country with a high overall population density and extremely limited access to other fuels. This is mostly in europe, with the suggestive exception of switzerland. In the end, the reason we don't have nuclear is the same reason we don't have solar or wind. The oil and coal interests are just too powerful, and the cost to develop alternatives simply represent a long term cost we are not willing to make.
So we get to the issue of cars. The issue of cars is not simply how clean they are. The issue with cars is a broader economic issue. For better or worse, mnay parts of the US are dependent on cars, and, for better or worse, full economic activity depends on many individuals driving over 100 miles a day. Economics agents being fundamentally irrational, many chose cars that consume ten gallons or more a day under such conditions. This is fine until such use consumes in excess of 3 or 4% of income. This is the problem in addition to clean air. Consumer living beyond their means. Although economist in the 90's thought that $25 a barrel was going to last forever, economists are not scientists. At this price it was unlikely that serious exploration would go on, and unlikely that serious extraction would go on, meaning we were limited to existing cheap reserves. This meant mostly in the middle east. At higher prices we can get more oil, but Americans are not willing to pay that much long term. The fact that india and china and europe are is likely to make the US preference unimportant. Therefore cars need to use alternative fuels that are in the $1 per 10 mile range. Electricity may or may not be it given that one might need 30-50 KWH to run a car for that distance. But given that coal is more available in the US than oil, and so it sun and wind, it will free us from competing for oil which we are not willing to pay a premium, and allow us to develop local oil fields for export to balance our trade numbers.