Sometimes it is just interesting to think about security, and security choices that are made. Certainly the security incompetence of most manufactures does not reach the level of homeland security, but neither does the security issues. It still is interesting to think about. For instance, the iPhone shows one letter of the password for usability, and this is likely worth the security compromise. Many web browser automatically cache a large number of previous web pages, and a large amount of history, so any minimally competent sleuth can determine everything you have done for the past week. This has security implications, yet when Firefox implemented the very reasonable privacy feature, they get ridiculed with installing a porn filter. In fact such history and cache can be argued to be a unnecessary security risk that should not be turned on by default, but the compromise has been made.
In this case, a potential security issue has been introduced for the purpose of look and feel. While the headline is sensational and seems to be written by a person with no technical background or understanding fo the iPhone, the point remains. Pictures of what you are doing prior to pressing the home button are taken, and stored for some indeterminate amount of time. This is like the browser issue, likely not a big problem. OTOH, there does not seem to be an option under the general/home button menu to turn off this effect, so there is no way for persons worried about the issue to turn it off. It is an interesting problem.
Company representatives are nothing new or interesting. Many printer companies will pay a rep to hang around the printer department and encourage you to buy their brand of printer. This is not helping the customer as it may be that the printer might not be best the customer. These people are level below the commission sales staff, because at least such staff will try to get you the best match of what is in stock.
These pushers are why MS can't sell vista. They want to sell the product, they want to market it, but they won't support it. What Apple has is the personal touch. Chat icon on the help website. People at the stores you can talk to when you have problem. They support the product. Anyone can go in and talk to a rep for free, even on old product. MS does not support anyone without an additional charge.
Here is what would encourage people to buy vista and MS based computers in general. For about 100 million dollars they could put a help technician in every best buy store. Just a person sitting a desk. Wiling to help anyone who came in with a question. I bet Best Buy would donate facilities. Anytime someone had an issue with any MS Windows based computer, just come in a get some help. Make a reservation. Get the help in person. Do you think MS spent less than $100 million on the series of ad with Seinfeld, and those don't help anyone. The sales droid walking around lying to customers don't help anyone either. It realy seems like MS will spend money on anything other than helping the end user.
I think this itunes is going to be a headache for everyone, I am not sure what all they did, what I do know is that Apple has once again combined feature and security updates. Shame on Apple for propagating bad culture.
For the record, the first time I tried to sync my iPod with the new iTunes on my Powerbook, I had to reboot the computer due to unresponsiveness. It took several attempts to get the iPod to properly connect to iTunes, and iTunes became unresponsive several times. Though everything seems to working fine now, I wonder what kind of issues I will see in the future.
Way back when, I read a study where researchers looked at the best way to act to maximize profits in business transactions. It turns out that modified tit for tat, or golden rule, works well. Transact with anyone who wishes to, and be fair and honest. If an agent is not honest in a transaction, then shun that agent for a while, and be cautious. It seems like common sense
What might surprise some, but what we often see, is that if there is a small clearly identifiable group, then profit is maximized by always trading with them dishonestly. This may lead to different observed behaviors. First, the dominant group seems to be hardwired, or at least in the habit of, cheating less dominant groups. Secondly, clearly identifiable subgroups seem to trust each other more than those outside the group.
Of course, civilized people are supposed to be interesting in things other than maximizing profits.
My battery is located in the trunk. Not a big deal to get to, not a big deal to remove, but more difficult than the two minutes it would take to pop the hood and rip the terminals off.
Twice I have had returned to a partially open hood. Neither time was anything missing, and neither time did the miscreant try to get into the trunk to take the battery. My trunk was broken into one, but there was no attempt to find or remove the battery.
Possibly as more people put batteries in trunk drug users, et al, will become more efficient at removing them from that location. At this point it appears that trunk batteries are safer. So why don't more batteries reside in the trunk? It is an engineering problem that the average car maker does not feel like solving. I am surprised that mercedes, who goes to so much trouble to isolate the battery from the rest of the engine, does not move the battery to the back. Perhaps there is some power limit for a sealed battery.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet.
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The naysayers retort is that no one ever has seen Hawking radiation. My retort is that we are afraid that a black hole, which is only a theoretical construct that requires that certain constructs go to infinity, is not being evaporated by Hawking radiation, which coincidentally is another theoretical construct which requires theoretical virtual particles to theoretically become real. If one fanciful theoretical object cannot be eliminated by another fanciful theoretical object, then all my education through bad science fiction is for naught.
In the end, right before we are destroyed, we can take solace in knowing two things. First, that black holes are real. Second, that Hawking radiation is not. Sometimes scientific proof comes at a great price.
The same is pretty much true for the general populous. Television provides a means to instill the standard of normalcy, provide a means to communicate the preferred values, ways of life, and the standard of living one is expected to attain. This switch over thing is going to be interesting. It may further alienate the growing number of have nots that are already alienated by having their homes repossessed, no longer being to drive an SUB, and now not have the means to put a TV in every room of the house. How many coupons does a family get? Two? Then they need to buy their own kit.
It matters little to me whether TV is digital. I am sure that the vast majority of the population will switch over. OTOH I have to agree that there are pockets of the population who will not be able to, and since TV is a key tool in the integration of America, I can see this causing problems. Not as big as some might like to believe, and not intentionally as the conspiracy theorist like to believe, but certainly some.
In any case, it seems to me another case where there is a massive transfer of wealth to the upper class, and the middle one again has to suffer.
MS just seems like the typical firm with money than sense, like the family who will come into a lot of money, then put a a statue that pees water by the pool.
For instance, it can't be that difficult to design an OS that works. Linux has done the basics, and it is free. Apple has done the GUI, with much less money than MS. Yet the best MS can do is a spend millions of dollars on pointless commercials. Is this because it has no idea how to fix the software? Is there no way to invest the 77% profit margin in making working products. Does it all have to spent on yachts.
And it is not rocket science to design a game console. We have had generations of them that worked very well. MS just jumped in and borrowed existing tech, then used the windows 77% percent profit margin to subsidize the costs. And the xBox 360 is the second generation product.
Of course, we must acknowledge that MS tried to design custom hardware, a task for which it has no experience. This leads to the question of why it couldn't just pay for someone to do it right. Oh yeah, the yachts.
People like to compare IBM to MS, and see MS slowing down, but then ultimately being successful like IBM. What people fail to realize is that IBM spent the money to make rock solid products. The Selectric was a damn near perfect machine. The big iron did their job. The IBM PC was bulletproof. I don't know how MS is going come out the other side of the desktop monopoly when Google moves all the customers to the clouds with a six nines failure rate, and MS is still living in a world where a four nines failure rate is acceptable.
So all we need to do to get rid of the superstitious zealots who tell me that I am going to hell because I recite a incantation, or that I am going to hell because I will not believe that that contradicts my own senses, or I am going to hell because I have enough faith to believe in the great unknown and the probably known is use more profanity? Shit ya'. I am so fucking in.
Facebook is no longer a college thing. It is a place where tweens chat and high school kids hook up. What does this matter? They can no longer play fast and loose. If it is going they are pretty much going to have to create restrictions that are not cool. If we are going to have a place to go, then there will have to compromises.
Shadow analysis could spot known terrorist, if we know who there are, and if we have sufficient information on them. That is nothing new. We can often spot terrorist if we know enough about them. Of course, we actually have to have the ability and desire to go to the caves where they are hiding and apprehend them.
But the real issue is that to stop terrorism we have know before hand the people that pose a real and credible threat. And I am not talking about the people with video cameras who are going to prove the police force is lying in statements or beating people up. I am talking about knowing that Timothy McVeigh is going to kill almost 200 people, including children. Or that Eric Rudolf was going to mount a extended reign of terror killing a innocent woman and a police officer. How does the gait analysis going to save the babies that the next religious extremist is going to kill?
Yes which means it is a work machine. Give this to the employees, students, etc, and it is possible they might be productive instead of watching p0rn all day. There are enough resources that don't depend on flash that it might make a good choice for the kiddos at home.
But seriously, if this can log onto a webdav partition, and run LaTeX, it might be a serious writing machine, akin to the Tandy 200 that was my mainstay for so long. It certainly runs OO.org, which allows one to make presentations, that should be able to be saved to flash, if not run.
Depending on what the final specs and availability are, i would certainly buy this for the days that I do not wish to carry the expensive machine.
First, it is good that Dell continues to learn from Apple. Create products with a profit margin to make a profit. While Dell has to sell the no profit, they have the voluntary contribution program in the white laptops. I hopes this helps the stock.
Second, we have never a seen a better example of the MS kickback. In exchange for exclusivity, it is clear that MS is offering some financial incentive. Linux is only sold on the smallest machine. It makes no sense for Linux not to be sold on all machines, except that MS does not want it so, and has the money to pay for the privilege of exclusivity.
The heat generated by current laptops, combine with the battery, is really making these quite uncomfortable. The new MacBook Pro is gets much hotter than the previous Powerbooks. If I have it plugged in and doing serious work, I will sometimes take the battery out. It should not make a difference if it is not charging, maybe it just allows more air to flow.
I can't imagine why we are designing hotter laptops. Heat is waste energy, which requires a bigger battery, which generates more heat...
These are, for the part, free optional services. Much of this has been discussed before. Google is in the business of selling ads, and so needs to be able to do as it likes to maximize the ad revenue. If it owns your stuff, then it can mine it as it wishes. As far as sites that allow the free display of pictures and videos, they need to recoup some bandwidth costs as well. One might to sublicense the content to other providers. Another might be the media. For example, I wonder if the pictures of the Republican Baby's Daddy were republished for free, or if there were some standard fee involved.
As far as deleting content, we all know that is BS. These users voluntarily unloaded the content. Not one forced them. They uploaded the content onto a free service and expect some privacy? That is like allowing some random house painters to paint you house for free, and expect all you stuff to be there when you get back.
I have much more sympathy for the TOS when a product is free than when the product has a real cost. The free service has to protect itself from intellectual theft and harassment by lawsuit. If a video sharing site did not own the content, or at least a license to it in perpetuity, then these services surely would be sued by young teen unmarried mother who was foolish enough to post a video of her naked baby running around the house, only to be chided by her mother that such pictures were not good publicity.
OTOH, the publicity of the TOS are good because they help educate the populous that nothing is truly free. The pictures, videos, and words you post can be used if and when there is a need for someone to so do. I am wondering if this is the year when a sex video has political ramifications. At least with words, you can say you were just playing around. So, I think as people get used to these free services, we will see a more sane approach to the situation. Honestly, this tech is just too new for social norms to have developed around them.
So, it is as the consensus of the comments suggest. If you sell it for inconvenience money, then they will probably pay the money and go away. If you choose not to sell it for a price they wish to pay, then they may take you to court. If you were foolish enough to fall into their trap and offer to sell, then they will use this to take away your property even if you don't wish to sell it.
What people don't seem to understand is that really, in the scheme of things, if I own something it is mine. The legal system should protect that. If I don't want to sell it, then I don't, in most cases, have to. One way of saying I don't want to sell it is to offer it for an insane amount of money.
Taking used to be used primarily for government sponsored project. Now it is used because some random company thinks that just because they can make money with a property, they should own it. This is why this question came up, and why the guy should try to protect himself. It is your domain name, fair in square. Even if you are squatting, there is a element of possession being nine tenth of the law. As the parent indicate, there are people who will do anything to take things that they want, unless the owner is willing to accept a token amount to 'voluntarily surrender the property'. This is not good. Sure, maybe trademarks need to be protected, but if my name is Coke, is there some fundamental reason why the beverage company has a higher claim on it than I do? If I had the foresight to register the domain, should I not be allowed to profit off that foresight? Is there something in the free market that one is allowed to make money unless it pisses off the multinationals?
Honestly, I think that the problem would be that there was no communication at all. This is another 'I have more money than I know what to do with and so my life is complicated issue'.
I recall not so long ago that there were time if I wanted to talk to certain people I had to walk down the street because these certain people did not even have a phone. Now we are so used to universal communication that if we can't text from the top of kilimanjaro we think there is a conspiracy afoot.
I live in an urban area, and I do so because I like the density of services. I, however, have spent enough time in rural areas and developing countries to know that the density of services are not universal.
Who would have thought all those years ago, when everyone was whining how important it was for a computer to be expandable, and configurable, and upgradable, that laptops sales would achieve parity, on a per unit basis, in 2008. This happened, of course, because most consumer, and many enterprise customers, don't significantly expand their computers. And though internal hard drives and the like might be cheaper, most people will simply choose to plug in these devices, just like a printer. Now that every computer has a decent high speed external port, not just macs, we see laptops for everyone.
The question to me then is how far off is the tablet, and will it be running Windows. Right now, as far as I can tell, most desktops are running Windows, and will continue to. The two reasons for this is desktops are cheap to supply to ever worker, and Windows has a huge number of legacy applications. It is the same reason big iron is still around.
At home, though, people seem to want cheap simple machines. Laptops are cheap and simple. As prices for touch displays and solid state memory fall, however, we could find ourselves in a world where a tablet is cheaper to deliver than a laptop, and in that world an good interface is going to be everything. A good interface and a cheap or free OS. I can't imagine that anyone would pay $50 for the OS on this $200 machine.
So yes, HP will continue to ship desktops and laptops that are windows based, but I believe we are five years away from the tablet for home use, and MS does not have a compelling product to run on it. If tablets begin to sell they will hack something together, just like they did for the OLPC, but if companies like Apple and HP sell at the high and low end of the market, it might be hard for MS to break in. Then we might have a nearly MS free market segment, and interesting things might happen.
You know, when you look at the variety businesses in a well run, well funded, more of less capitalist society like the United States, as opposed to some other places with much less government, you appreciate the value of a government. A government that can create a secure place for investment to happen. A government that can create a level playing field so that anyone can open a business and compete. A government that can enforce a consistance set of standards so that legitimate businesses are not undercut by those who simply want to make a quick buck.
Yes taxes suck, but they do provide the environment in which businesses can flourish. Otherwise why would businesses open in high tax areas and then try to cheat on the taxes, rather than migrate to ultra low tax areas. I, for instance live in a high tax area and i think half the restaurants in the city are located here. one wonders why they don't move out to a lower tax area, or even across the border where they could not pay any taxes. Because the customers are here and customers are here because the infrastructure is here.
Every time I hear someone complain that the taxes are too high and they want to move I say go. Someone else will soon take their place because they appreciate the infrastructure and convince of the city. There is no free lunch, and the hypocrisy of most business owners is they expect to get paid for their product, no matter how crappy it is, but feel put out when they are asked to do the same.
And if I was not clear, taxes are voluntary. You can always find someplace else to live. I hear they are hiring in Iraq. You pay no taxes on income, room and board is generally paid, also tax free.
The problem is that we have grown to depend on these confidence scams. The entire housing boom is confidence scam. The appraisers over value houses with kickbacks from the builders. The realtors love the overvaluation because they get paid on commision. The banks are happy to loan money using the overvaluations because they get a cut as well, and have little long term risk as they are able to use more fraud to sell loan to investors and government agencies. The new buyers are happy to pay the high prices because it is not costing them anything anyway, as the increasing prices actually generates income for them as well. The only people it hurts in the short run are the homeowners who have to pay increasing taxes.
Of course at some point the house of cards fell, and the home investor no longer has a cash generating property, so they walk away from the loan, or get government welfare. The builders have already made their money. The banks do feel some shock, but the tax payer helps bail them out. No one implicated in the scam loses any money they made. Again, the only people who get hurt are the honest homeowners.
So, I can see why these scams are so successful. We are addicted to these get rich schemes and believe that they are a natural order of life. We believe in magic, that there is no cause and effect, just random chance. We will get rich through the lottery. Those people who run the store got rich through luck, not hard work, and we were just not given the lucky break. they don't really deserve all that money.
At some point, the individual should take some responsibility and not be fooled by brine shrimp/sea people scam. We should understand that we cannot own a $60,000 car for $250 a month. This is where education comes in. Of course an educated populous is harder to fool, so it is dangerous to educate people too much. They might know enough so we can't take advantage of the natural greed.
We don't really need more cops. We just need a justice department that will hire competent lawyers, not lawyers with the proper superstitious beliefs in random events, to go prosecute the people who commit the crimes.
I agree We currently have three shuttles. It is not feasible to run a long term program on three vehicles. At some point one will no longer be serviceable, and we will have two vehicles, with no successor program.
It is clear to me that there is not serious desire to create the next space vehicle. President Bush promised a new Space Age, but failed to fund it. Clearly he has no problem spending money, even money we don't have, so the fact that we have no functioning Orion space craft 4 and half years after he made the promise can only mean that he never really wanted a space program. By comparison, the Shuttle program was formally launched in 1972 and the Enterprise was ready 5 years later in 1977.
McCain has said his major concern is the reliability of the Russians, which me that he will likely push the shuttle program until we have no vehicles left, and even then I see no evidence he will push to fund the Orion. We have no idea what his vice president would do, but I have little hope tha the parent of special needs infant would have any time to do much of anything.
For that matter we don't know what Obama would do, but since we will five years behind by the time he has a chance, the damage will already be done. Four years with no space program, when we have work to do in space.
There were protests at the convention. One involved a bunch of veterans pulling a publicity stunt by blocking access to the convention. One of the spokespeople said they were hoping they could incite a response and prove that democrats did not care about veterans. In the end, the ringleader was allowed in to talk to an Obama staff member. You see that is what civilized people do. Talk out their grievances. When you over react and begin to violate civil rights, you simply prove that the corruption and greed they are protesting against is real. This is why the KKK is allowed to wander around aimlessly and harmlessly on city streets. They just want to start something, and blame the other guy. The protestors, like the terrorist, have won. The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.
. Now, most "pro-choice" people that I've met say that they fully support measures which create an environment that makes abortion less frequent.
That is certainly true. A Pro-Choice position is often an holistic desire to make sure every child is a wanted child, and every pregnancy is wanted pregnancy. So part of the position is huge amounts of pre-natal care, parent education, and child welfare. However, sometimes an over forty mother, with a good size family, might find herself pregnant, and find that the child was going to spend their life suffering. This would be a case where an abortion might be called for, and the mother might make the hard decision(it might be, as republicans like to say, that the welfare mother is just having the child to collect the welfare payments, in which case the decision might to have the child and let it suffer, as that would be more money). The issue is not killing the baby, but preventing the baby from dying slowly as would be case years ago. There are plenty of situation where abortions occur as part of the natural cycle. There is no reason to expect that people will get pregnant just to have abortions any more than we would expect the murder rate of organ donors to be greater than the general populous.
You're obviously arguing from the perspective of a secularist, but what you're really saying is that any opinion that is based on religion is prima facie unacceptable in a democratic debate
This predates 'religion'. This has to do with an the ancient argument of a priori and a posteriori, the question of whether knowledge can be constructed with no primary experience. The side of religion often takes the sides of things being true even though our eyes say it is not true. The world is flat, black people are inferior, god created man, god destroyed new orleans and new york as god destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. These are all very popular beliefs, and these beliefs are impossible to get rid of, except over multigenerational time scales, because they are based on the idea that truth is handed down, not discovered. The situation is made worse by the fact that the actual revealed truths, such as the revealed truth that if someone want our coat, we should give them our shirt as well, is ignored even though it does have some basis in personal experience. So yes, a person who does not want to fall into a trap of superstition will often ignore religion. After all, if most of us wanted to cure our child, we would go to medical doctor, not pray that the child is not allowed to die, though the bible clearly states that we should do the later. In fact, when a deeply religious person wants to follow the revealed word and allow the child to die as god intended, most other allegedly god fearing people say that is wrong..
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do." Science is just a method for observing natural phenomenon.
If every time we get put our hand on the stove we get burned, then science tell us not to put our hand on the stove. If all our friends are getting AIDS, the science tells us we should be not promiscuous. If study after study that tit for tat, or treat others as you would have them treat you, but be careful of those who have tricked you before, the science tells us we should follow the golden rule. It is true that ccience, unlike religion, does not tell us that we ought to kill other people because they look different from us or believe differently from us, or that certain people have a right to more money than others just because they were born to certain family or said certain incantations. Science tells us that if treat each other fairly and work hard then society will raise and will become a better place.
In fact I would say that, for the most part, science and religion are reaching the same conclusions. Be excellent to one another. Use the gifts that god gives us to help each other. Create a world so thy kingdom come and thy will be done
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, a potential security issue has been introduced for the purpose of look and feel. While the headline is sensational and seems to be written by a person with no technical background or understanding fo the iPhone, the point remains. Pictures of what you are doing prior to pressing the home button are taken, and stored for some indeterminate amount of time. This is like the browser issue, likely not a big problem. OTOH, there does not seem to be an option under the general/home button menu to turn off this effect, so there is no way for persons worried about the issue to turn it off. It is an interesting problem.
These pushers are why MS can't sell vista. They want to sell the product, they want to market it, but they won't support it. What Apple has is the personal touch. Chat icon on the help website. People at the stores you can talk to when you have problem. They support the product. Anyone can go in and talk to a rep for free, even on old product. MS does not support anyone without an additional charge.
Here is what would encourage people to buy vista and MS based computers in general. For about 100 million dollars they could put a help technician in every best buy store. Just a person sitting a desk. Wiling to help anyone who came in with a question. I bet Best Buy would donate facilities. Anytime someone had an issue with any MS Windows based computer, just come in a get some help. Make a reservation. Get the help in person. Do you think MS spent less than $100 million on the series of ad with Seinfeld, and those don't help anyone. The sales droid walking around lying to customers don't help anyone either. It realy seems like MS will spend money on anything other than helping the end user.
For the record, the first time I tried to sync my iPod with the new iTunes on my Powerbook, I had to reboot the computer due to unresponsiveness. It took several attempts to get the iPod to properly connect to iTunes, and iTunes became unresponsive several times. Though everything seems to working fine now, I wonder what kind of issues I will see in the future.
What might surprise some, but what we often see, is that if there is a small clearly identifiable group, then profit is maximized by always trading with them dishonestly. This may lead to different observed behaviors. First, the dominant group seems to be hardwired, or at least in the habit of, cheating less dominant groups. Secondly, clearly identifiable subgroups seem to trust each other more than those outside the group.
Of course, civilized people are supposed to be interesting in things other than maximizing profits.
Twice I have had returned to a partially open hood. Neither time was anything missing, and neither time did the miscreant try to get into the trunk to take the battery. My trunk was broken into one, but there was no attempt to find or remove the battery.
Possibly as more people put batteries in trunk drug users, et al, will become more efficient at removing them from that location. At this point it appears that trunk batteries are safer. So why don't more batteries reside in the trunk? It is an engineering problem that the average car maker does not feel like solving. I am surprised that mercedes, who goes to so much trouble to isolate the battery from the rest of the engine, does not move the battery to the back. Perhaps there is some power limit for a sealed battery.
The naysayers retort is that no one ever has seen Hawking radiation. My retort is that we are afraid that a black hole, which is only a theoretical construct that requires that certain constructs go to infinity, is not being evaporated by Hawking radiation, which coincidentally is another theoretical construct which requires theoretical virtual particles to theoretically become real. If one fanciful theoretical object cannot be eliminated by another fanciful theoretical object, then all my education through bad science fiction is for naught. In the end, right before we are destroyed, we can take solace in knowing two things. First, that black holes are real. Second, that Hawking radiation is not. Sometimes scientific proof comes at a great price.
The LHC Rap. Entertaining and Educational. Edutaining.
But it will do you old enough to to have a sex life. (not work or school friendly)
It matters little to me whether TV is digital. I am sure that the vast majority of the population will switch over. OTOH I have to agree that there are pockets of the population who will not be able to, and since TV is a key tool in the integration of America, I can see this causing problems. Not as big as some might like to believe, and not intentionally as the conspiracy theorist like to believe, but certainly some.
In any case, it seems to me another case where there is a massive transfer of wealth to the upper class, and the middle one again has to suffer.
For instance, it can't be that difficult to design an OS that works. Linux has done the basics, and it is free. Apple has done the GUI, with much less money than MS. Yet the best MS can do is a spend millions of dollars on pointless commercials. Is this because it has no idea how to fix the software? Is there no way to invest the 77% profit margin in making working products. Does it all have to spent on yachts.
And it is not rocket science to design a game console. We have had generations of them that worked very well. MS just jumped in and borrowed existing tech, then used the windows 77% percent profit margin to subsidize the costs. And the xBox 360 is the second generation product.
Of course, we must acknowledge that MS tried to design custom hardware, a task for which it has no experience. This leads to the question of why it couldn't just pay for someone to do it right. Oh yeah, the yachts.
People like to compare IBM to MS, and see MS slowing down, but then ultimately being successful like IBM. What people fail to realize is that IBM spent the money to make rock solid products. The Selectric was a damn near perfect machine. The big iron did their job. The IBM PC was bulletproof. I don't know how MS is going come out the other side of the desktop monopoly when Google moves all the customers to the clouds with a six nines failure rate, and MS is still living in a world where a four nines failure rate is acceptable.
So all we need to do to get rid of the superstitious zealots who tell me that I am going to hell because I recite a incantation, or that I am going to hell because I will not believe that that contradicts my own senses, or I am going to hell because I have enough faith to believe in the great unknown and the probably known is use more profanity? Shit ya'. I am so fucking in.
Facebook is no longer a college thing. It is a place where tweens chat and high school kids hook up. What does this matter? They can no longer play fast and loose. If it is going they are pretty much going to have to create restrictions that are not cool. If we are going to have a place to go, then there will have to compromises.
But the real issue is that to stop terrorism we have know before hand the people that pose a real and credible threat. And I am not talking about the people with video cameras who are going to prove the police force is lying in statements or beating people up. I am talking about knowing that Timothy McVeigh is going to kill almost 200 people, including children. Or that Eric Rudolf was going to mount a extended reign of terror killing a innocent woman and a police officer. How does the gait analysis going to save the babies that the next religious extremist is going to kill?
But seriously, if this can log onto a webdav partition, and run LaTeX, it might be a serious writing machine, akin to the Tandy 200 that was my mainstay for so long. It certainly runs OO.org, which allows one to make presentations, that should be able to be saved to flash, if not run.
Depending on what the final specs and availability are, i would certainly buy this for the days that I do not wish to carry the expensive machine.
Second, we have never a seen a better example of the MS kickback. In exchange for exclusivity, it is clear that MS is offering some financial incentive. Linux is only sold on the smallest machine. It makes no sense for Linux not to be sold on all machines, except that MS does not want it so, and has the money to pay for the privilege of exclusivity.
I can't imagine why we are designing hotter laptops. Heat is waste energy, which requires a bigger battery, which generates more heat...
As far as deleting content, we all know that is BS. These users voluntarily unloaded the content. Not one forced them. They uploaded the content onto a free service and expect some privacy? That is like allowing some random house painters to paint you house for free, and expect all you stuff to be there when you get back.
I have much more sympathy for the TOS when a product is free than when the product has a real cost. The free service has to protect itself from intellectual theft and harassment by lawsuit. If a video sharing site did not own the content, or at least a license to it in perpetuity, then these services surely would be sued by young teen unmarried mother who was foolish enough to post a video of her naked baby running around the house, only to be chided by her mother that such pictures were not good publicity.
OTOH, the publicity of the TOS are good because they help educate the populous that nothing is truly free. The pictures, videos, and words you post can be used if and when there is a need for someone to so do. I am wondering if this is the year when a sex video has political ramifications. At least with words, you can say you were just playing around. So, I think as people get used to these free services, we will see a more sane approach to the situation. Honestly, this tech is just too new for social norms to have developed around them.
What people don't seem to understand is that really, in the scheme of things, if I own something it is mine. The legal system should protect that. If I don't want to sell it, then I don't, in most cases, have to. One way of saying I don't want to sell it is to offer it for an insane amount of money.
Taking used to be used primarily for government sponsored project. Now it is used because some random company thinks that just because they can make money with a property, they should own it. This is why this question came up, and why the guy should try to protect himself. It is your domain name, fair in square. Even if you are squatting, there is a element of possession being nine tenth of the law. As the parent indicate, there are people who will do anything to take things that they want, unless the owner is willing to accept a token amount to 'voluntarily surrender the property'. This is not good. Sure, maybe trademarks need to be protected, but if my name is Coke, is there some fundamental reason why the beverage company has a higher claim on it than I do? If I had the foresight to register the domain, should I not be allowed to profit off that foresight? Is there something in the free market that one is allowed to make money unless it pisses off the multinationals?
I recall not so long ago that there were time if I wanted to talk to certain people I had to walk down the street because these certain people did not even have a phone. Now we are so used to universal communication that if we can't text from the top of kilimanjaro we think there is a conspiracy afoot.
I live in an urban area, and I do so because I like the density of services. I, however, have spent enough time in rural areas and developing countries to know that the density of services are not universal.
The question to me then is how far off is the tablet, and will it be running Windows. Right now, as far as I can tell, most desktops are running Windows, and will continue to. The two reasons for this is desktops are cheap to supply to ever worker, and Windows has a huge number of legacy applications. It is the same reason big iron is still around.
At home, though, people seem to want cheap simple machines. Laptops are cheap and simple. As prices for touch displays and solid state memory fall, however, we could find ourselves in a world where a tablet is cheaper to deliver than a laptop, and in that world an good interface is going to be everything. A good interface and a cheap or free OS. I can't imagine that anyone would pay $50 for the OS on this $200 machine.
So yes, HP will continue to ship desktops and laptops that are windows based, but I believe we are five years away from the tablet for home use, and MS does not have a compelling product to run on it. If tablets begin to sell they will hack something together, just like they did for the OLPC, but if companies like Apple and HP sell at the high and low end of the market, it might be hard for MS to break in. Then we might have a nearly MS free market segment, and interesting things might happen.
Yes taxes suck, but they do provide the environment in which businesses can flourish. Otherwise why would businesses open in high tax areas and then try to cheat on the taxes, rather than migrate to ultra low tax areas. I, for instance live in a high tax area and i think half the restaurants in the city are located here. one wonders why they don't move out to a lower tax area, or even across the border where they could not pay any taxes. Because the customers are here and customers are here because the infrastructure is here.
Every time I hear someone complain that the taxes are too high and they want to move I say go. Someone else will soon take their place because they appreciate the infrastructure and convince of the city. There is no free lunch, and the hypocrisy of most business owners is they expect to get paid for their product, no matter how crappy it is, but feel put out when they are asked to do the same.
And if I was not clear, taxes are voluntary. You can always find someplace else to live. I hear they are hiring in Iraq. You pay no taxes on income, room and board is generally paid, also tax free.
Of course at some point the house of cards fell, and the home investor no longer has a cash generating property, so they walk away from the loan, or get government welfare. The builders have already made their money. The banks do feel some shock, but the tax payer helps bail them out. No one implicated in the scam loses any money they made. Again, the only people who get hurt are the honest homeowners.
So, I can see why these scams are so successful. We are addicted to these get rich schemes and believe that they are a natural order of life. We believe in magic, that there is no cause and effect, just random chance. We will get rich through the lottery. Those people who run the store got rich through luck, not hard work, and we were just not given the lucky break. they don't really deserve all that money.
At some point, the individual should take some responsibility and not be fooled by brine shrimp/sea people scam. We should understand that we cannot own a $60,000 car for $250 a month. This is where education comes in. Of course an educated populous is harder to fool, so it is dangerous to educate people too much. They might know enough so we can't take advantage of the natural greed.
We don't really need more cops. We just need a justice department that will hire competent lawyers, not lawyers with the proper superstitious beliefs in random events, to go prosecute the people who commit the crimes.
It is clear to me that there is not serious desire to create the next space vehicle. President Bush promised a new Space Age, but failed to fund it. Clearly he has no problem spending money, even money we don't have, so the fact that we have no functioning Orion space craft 4 and half years after he made the promise can only mean that he never really wanted a space program. By comparison, the Shuttle program was formally launched in 1972 and the Enterprise was ready 5 years later in 1977.
McCain has said his major concern is the reliability of the Russians, which me that he will likely push the shuttle program until we have no vehicles left, and even then I see no evidence he will push to fund the Orion. We have no idea what his vice president would do, but I have little hope tha the parent of special needs infant would have any time to do much of anything.
For that matter we don't know what Obama would do, but since we will five years behind by the time he has a chance, the damage will already be done. Four years with no space program, when we have work to do in space.
There were protests at the convention. One involved a bunch of veterans pulling a publicity stunt by blocking access to the convention. One of the spokespeople said they were hoping they could incite a response and prove that democrats did not care about veterans. In the end, the ringleader was allowed in to talk to an Obama staff member. You see that is what civilized people do. Talk out their grievances. When you over react and begin to violate civil rights, you simply prove that the corruption and greed they are protesting against is real. This is why the KKK is allowed to wander around aimlessly and harmlessly on city streets. They just want to start something, and blame the other guy. The protestors, like the terrorist, have won. The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.
That is certainly true. A Pro-Choice position is often an holistic desire to make sure every child is a wanted child, and every pregnancy is wanted pregnancy. So part of the position is huge amounts of pre-natal care, parent education, and child welfare. However, sometimes an over forty mother, with a good size family, might find herself pregnant, and find that the child was going to spend their life suffering. This would be a case where an abortion might be called for, and the mother might make the hard decision(it might be, as republicans like to say, that the welfare mother is just having the child to collect the welfare payments, in which case the decision might to have the child and let it suffer, as that would be more money). The issue is not killing the baby, but preventing the baby from dying slowly as would be case years ago. There are plenty of situation where abortions occur as part of the natural cycle. There is no reason to expect that people will get pregnant just to have abortions any more than we would expect the murder rate of organ donors to be greater than the general populous.
You're obviously arguing from the perspective of a secularist, but what you're really saying is that any opinion that is based on religion is prima facie unacceptable in a democratic debate
This predates 'religion'. This has to do with an the ancient argument of a priori and a posteriori, the question of whether knowledge can be constructed with no primary experience. The side of religion often takes the sides of things being true even though our eyes say it is not true. The world is flat, black people are inferior, god created man, god destroyed new orleans and new york as god destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. These are all very popular beliefs, and these beliefs are impossible to get rid of, except over multigenerational time scales, because they are based on the idea that truth is handed down, not discovered. The situation is made worse by the fact that the actual revealed truths, such as the revealed truth that if someone want our coat, we should give them our shirt as well, is ignored even though it does have some basis in personal experience. So yes, a person who does not want to fall into a trap of superstition will often ignore religion. After all, if most of us wanted to cure our child, we would go to medical doctor, not pray that the child is not allowed to die, though the bible clearly states that we should do the later. In fact, when a deeply religious person wants to follow the revealed word and allow the child to die as god intended, most other allegedly god fearing people say that is wrong..
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do." Science is just a method for observing natural phenomenon.
If every time we get put our hand on the stove we get burned, then science tell us not to put our hand on the stove. If all our friends are getting AIDS, the science tells us we should be not promiscuous. If study after study that tit for tat, or treat others as you would have them treat you, but be careful of those who have tricked you before, the science tells us we should follow the golden rule. It is true that ccience, unlike religion, does not tell us that we ought to kill other people because they look different from us or believe differently from us, or that certain people have a right to more money than others just because they were born to certain family or said certain incantations. Science tells us that if treat each other fairly and work hard then society will raise and will become a better place.
In fact I would say that, for the most part, science and religion are reaching the same conclusions. Be excellent to one another. Use the gifts that god gives us to help each other. Create a world so thy kingdom come and thy will be done