The real problem with DVDs is having to go through the agony of watching all the warnings, ads, and amatuer animation, before being allowed to watch the movie that one has duly licensed. This agony clearly drives consumers to the P2P networks to acquire a copy that just allows us to watch the movie, without 5 minutes of 'value added content'.
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
Why is this anymore scary than American oil interests setting policy in places like Nigeria or Iraq or many other number of countries. Or America killing it's own people in brutal and often unnecessary standoffs.
I have said it before and I will say it again, and I will get labeled a troll. Over the entire history the USA has proven it willingness to acquire military force and use the overwhelming advantage to destroy anyone who opposes it. This is no different from the superpowers that preceded it. Therefore, anyone that pisses off the US, or cuts a special deal with the US, and then is surprised when the US acts with overwhelming force, is in a dreamland. It is probably not right, it is probably not a healthy way to exist, but it is not surprising.
When the FBI comes in and annihilates a group of people that has been taunting the US government, this is not surprising. When the military comes in and bombs a a city back to the dark ages, killing untold number of civilians, this is not surprising. When the US policy makers create a system that will allow a retail chain to create a class of indentured servants, this is not surprising.
Many of us believe this is wrong, and are trying to change it. But this is the way it is right now. If you want change, use your wallet and your feet. The system only works because consumers buy the products of the people who want to oppress us. Stealing *AA products is not going to help. Buying non-*AA might. Complaining that an illegal warehouse has been raiding is not going to help. Help creating a competing counter culture might.
Complaining about this when international humanitarian rights are being violated on a daily basis is just narcissistic beyond belief. Corporate music and video is not a basic human right. Try to make you won jam.
Their coffee is something special. It is an enhanced drug delivery system, supplying about 25% more caffeine than the average cup of coffee. If the customers have gotten used to that level of caffeine, above 500 mg for venti, other products would not provide the same relief. Noting the tiny people that seem to frequent starbucks, the dosage might be 10 mg/kg. The LD_50 for caffeine might be as low as 150mg/kg. I get worried when I see a parent buying their preteen kid a latte.
The thing is we do sometimes have a choice. We don't have a choice about EULA, since they are everywhere. The courts have to fix it. But we do have a choice if we wish to be treated like a criminal at the places we spend money. Target does not treat me like a criminal. Walgreens does not treat me like a criminal. I may choose to 'save' money by shopping at walmart in exchange for giving up certain rights. That is my choice, and I can't really blame anyone else for the consequences of that choice.
The review made no sense,and shows no concept of what is needed in an average k-12 classroom. To add, and eMac is not the consumer or commerical model. It is the K-12 educational model. If I had 15 of these in my classroom, I would be in heaven. The fact that it doesn't run the latest games would be the biggest selling point. It just needs to run math tutorials, many of them text on a simple GUI.
As far as saving stuff, I suspect I would have every student get a $20 USB drive. OTOH, the review is clearly trying to select the truth that fits. Every eMac comes with a combo drive which can write CDs. The high end model had a superdrive with can write DVDs. I don't suspect either would happen on a regular basis, and I would set up limited accounts for the students that had this feature disabled
The same goes for the harddrive. Most data for studets should be stored on thier own media. In my days we each had our own 5 1/4. If I collect assesment data, this is stored on a network sever, often offsite at the company we contract with. The harddrive holds only applications. And since this is not a windows machine in which the kids will be constantly downloading virus, spyware, and games, the hard disk can be small.
For a family looking for a cheap computer, this may not be the ideal choice. For a school, the fact that I can manage the classroom by diableing certain features, that I do not have to worry about kids downloading virus and spyware, and the fact that it is a sturdy one piece machine makes it great choice.
It is called treason, and while the US government aggressively pursues certain classes and colors of people, it tends to turn a blind eye to the corporate and white elite. For instance, we have seen yet another case a Guatonoma in which the government spent untold sums of money pursuing Muslim persons and evidence that turned out to nearly nonexistent. All this while unpatriotic corporations and individuals refuse to pay the taxes needed to support our children risking their lives in foreign lands.
It really is ridiculous. For instance, Ames was suspected or treason twenty years ago, and it took 10 years to prove it. In the end, this man who compromised our country to an unknown degree, and contributed to the death of several Americans, got life in prison. In a country where our president would kill a man if he accidently shot a clerk during a robbery. And we never heard of Ames being harassed or fired.
Compare this to some of the non-white workers in the US. There was recently a story about a couple who was fired from their non-classified government research job, for no apparent reason. Oh, they may have once attended a legal but questionable party hosted by a questionable organization. And the case of the researcher who was fired and jailed on evidence that later proved nonexistent. His life destroyed by bigoted investigators, of the same organization that allowed Ames to kill 10 patriotic agents. Madness.
I see it as a bit more complicated than this. With each iteration of technology, wax cylinders, wax discs, vinyl disks, reel to reel, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, DAT, the labels had some hope of reselling music in the different format. Not only that, but the labels had a hope of reselling music in different collections. Furthermore, it was not really that big a deal that kids were not buying music, but merely copying it, as it was likely that they would later buy the music in an effort to relive their wasted youth. So, a hit single could have a consumer cash generating lifetime measured in decades. A hit album might be expected to be purchased several times by the same consumer.
Now this gravy train is gone. A consumer only needs to buy one copy of the song, and then mix and match it into any collection. A label can no longer put out a collection of 4 golden oldies and 10 pieces of crap and expect to get paid $20. The consumer can now duplicate the same album for nothing, or, if feeling generous, a few dollars on iTunes.
The labels can no longer expect to make huge profits when the next audio format is introduced. The current format is MP3, which will not generate the profits that the CD did because everyone, like myself, just converted the music at home. Whatever the next format is will likely generate equally disappointing sales.
So all this is to put a lifetime on the music. To insure that the next generation will have to buy old music. Without this planned obsolesce of the recording, the labels are in a hopeless situation.
I know that everyone likes firefox, and when I am forced to use a lame MS machine I use firefox. However, when i set up average user I install moz.
This is why. If I set up thunder as the email client, and then firefox as the web client, that leads to more choices, and choices are what often cause significant security problems for the average user. Perhpas they will open IE instead of firefox. If the web window is already open, then the use of IE will be less likely.
So, in a setting in which the inherently insecure features of IE are not needed, running mozilla is one way to keep IE from being run. The user will load up moz for email, and continue for web browsing.
Sometimes it is a matter of opportunity costs. There may be limited funds, and if those funds are spent on project A, say a TelePrompter, then funds will not be available for project B, say buying dinner for clients after the presentation. Since dinner must be bought, the TelePrompter must be homemade. And while your time is worth something, the time spent in building the TelePrompter will be billed as an investment in acquiring clients and building the business.
This is really why windows was used so much in the 90's. The computer were relatively cheap. The software was easy to acquire for little cash. The stability compared to other platforms was irrelevant because software for other platforms was harder to get. Money spent on software was not seen an investment to build the business.
Absolutely. We don't want the ignorant masses on/. . (dot dot...dot) We don't want those foul evil MS users to sully up out space. We would never want them to know that there was software before MS, and there will be software after MS. We don't want them to know the *nix is not just an alternative, but the granddaddy. And we certainly don't want them to know that the MS tax is optional.
The interesting thing is I still have my startac. I don't know what i would have bought if I had been in the market for a phone in the past few years, but i know the phone to get now is a razr.
So many of the phones are sold as a cheap thing you can throw away when your contract runs out(now a draconian two years), or a feature ladened behemeth that you can impress your freinds with. Motorola still seems to be the company that will produce quality irrespective of a price point.
For help you might want to look at the documentary called The Terrible Thunderlizards, which ran with Eek! The cat. It revealed research that suggested a reptile civilization at least as advanced as 20th century humans. Another revelation, though not new, was that a primitive humanoid species existed contemporaneously with the much capable reptile species, but the humanoids were too clever for the reptiles.
The later findings are corroborated by any number of respected books and television shows. By comparison, Eek! was intellectually devoid, and no significant assertions about the nature of life were ever made, other than the obvious lesson that no good deed goes unpunished.
This seems way complex. From a lay point of view the cost of stock options should be (1)the value that that stock might be sold for if it were not given away to the employee or (2) the cost of acquiring the stock that will then be given to the employee. If I pay $10 to an employee, that is the money out the profits. It does not matter if that money comes from the cookie jar, the garage sale, or borrowing from a bank. Like the corporate tax code, the complications come from the firms desire to have sanctioned fibs.
For upper management stock options, if not backed by zero-percent loans shill loans, can clearly build loyalty to a company. For the average employee stock options are nothing but a way to externalize labor costs in an effort to manufactur profit. It also can put an employee in serious financial and tax trouble since the average person is ill able to navigate the financial landscape without a good advisors. The advisors, of course, are often paid for by the firm, and employee stock options are sometimes used as a cheap way to keep the market cap up.
This has been too long coming. As berkshie-hathawy stated, I believe in last years report, transparency dictates the stock option be used intentialy, and be reported. A significant part of the dot com fantasy of free money was stock options, and it is one it's last remnants.
It is a design decision. A single button mouse is fine if the UI is carefully designed to to use the simplest interface. With a Mac I never miss the second button as it is seldom the best way to execute a command. On a PC a second button is needded as the best way to access many features.
One can also see this with keyboards. Many PC ship with 10 or more extra keys to execute specilized commands. While this may be useful for a small subset, it annoys me that the extra keys make the keyboard bigger than it has to be and it causes confusion. For instance, on my compaq laptop there is a row a ancillary buttons across the top. The most important button, the start up button, is just one these buttons, barely differentiated. Everytime I want to turn on the machine I must look for the button. Time wasted because someone wanted to look technologically advanced by including lots of buttons.
The phone I want from apple has the structure of iPod mini, but much smaller. No keyboard, no speaker, no mic. Bluetooth to a headset. Scrollwheel selects person to call. Sync to adress book and datebook. If the networks would get full caller ID, like the bells, numbers could be stored with names. In fact I have often wondered how hard it would be add phone capability to the mini, and, of course, bluetooth.
The keyboard on a phone is useful for texting, but a popup keyboard and the scrollwheel could be just as useful, expecially with predictive technology and a phrase bank. I will never buy a phone in which the data cannot be gathered from my laptop. The current cellphone is evolved from 70's technology. It is time for something different.
One of the silliest presentations I have seen lately was the study of an ex-military official study that tried to link the violent video games to the violence on the streets. He had a point that the video games use some the same desentivsation techniques that the military uses, but lost it when he asserted that the techniques would be equally effective when presented as a game rather than by a drill sargent.
Of course, no mention was made of the fact that when the kids turn on the TV the US is once agian using violence to solve problems. The president ordered the death of more people in texas than any other governor anywhere. The diplomacy of the state departmen has been trumped by the needs of the military.
Kids learn to kill and that killing is ok from many different sources. What is missing is the lessons on who to deal with problems peacefully. The continuing subtext that only the weak need diplomacy just makes it that much more likely that a kid is going torture and murder an advesary. This is expecially true when the would be killer has to prove he or she is not weak.
This seems like one of those things that is added in the name of security but is really just there to satisfy the voyeristic needs of some mal-adjusted engineer. Have you seen the articles on casino who use the video cameras to stare down a women's dresses?
If you are going to break in, you will just cover the camera. The value of things bought from the kiosk can't be that much. And the hope of catching a mailer of pipe bomb or laced letter must be nil. People are sending laced letters because it is the only thing you can put in an anonymous letter box.
This is worse than not allowing men to wear hats in a bank. Is every women in a shawl going to be a suspect. Is every man in a large coat going to be arrested. Next thing you know they are going to deman that everyone must be topless to buy a stamp. That would make the sicko government officials happpy. Fratboys in every level of government, a keg party on the capital.
Your analogy fails because the TeeVee was not free. The free TeeVee is generaly W3C compliant, and anyone could create content on it with little knowledge.
What happened is that there was this free 'upgrade' for this teevee that you already paid for. As long as you bought a new teevee every year, you also got the free upgrade. The other compliant stuff was still out there, but this non-compliant upgrade was specialy designed for the teevee, and you were told that if you did not use the certified upgrade you would be audited and fined triple damages.
You bought the new teevee, you got the extra stuff. You could use the old free stuff with old teevee, but that again might bring an audit.
So MS should tell customers to limit MS Windows machines to those people that can be educated and will not download stuff just because they think it is funny to screw thier boss. (When the 900 numbers first came out, I was in a sales office where the sales people would call the number just to run up the phone bill).
If the cost of education and monitoring is too great, then MS should suggest the customer buy non-MS solutions.
It is hard for techno-geeks to understand, especially those that are middle class and tend to have access to some computer at an pre-college age, and probably blocks as well, but not everyone can learn math.
What we do in the US is pretty interesting. We expect every one of our citizens to learn math. And not just math, but advanced abstract concepts like irrational numbers and numbers that don't even exist. If you doubt how hard these things are to understand, just note that in the western world there was a long time between the greeks, with their straight edge, protractor, and rational numbers, to the point where we could solve irrational equations and develop a general 'algebra'.
In the fantasy world, everyone has always learned math. In the real world, people did learn their times tables, and could handle rational numbers, and perhaps those skills have gone, but when dealing with high school algebra, that has always been issue. My father talked about teaching kids in the 60's and realizing they never learned to measure. In fact we did good things by exposing the masses to the ideas, and allowing those who could progress to do so, but we did very little in developing abstract thought in the rest.
Which for better or worse is the current mandate of education in the US. Th modern industrial complex requires two types of people. Drones that have interpersonal skills and can work a computer, and drones that can accept a general set of instruction to either solve a problem or create a procedure that other drones can use to solve a problem. There are few position available for the worker that has traditionally been the product of the US educational system.
So, how do we do this by the time a student reaches 18. This can be hard as many people do not develop the ability to think abstractly until nearly 18. Under the current system, we start teaching abstract thought at 14 or before. One device is mask the abstract thought in concrete objects and hope the concepts transfer when the pupil has sufficiently developed. One effective way to do this is with the computer. The computer can handle the complex, often abstract calculation, while the pupil can learn by observing the cause and effect of the actions. For instance, the pupil can solve an abstract equation by naming the operations, and the computer can correctly apply the operations. Likewise, the public can put specific points that are a solution to an equation, and the computer can verify the validity of those points, and when appropriately, allow the student to fit a curve. In more advance math, the computer can model Reiman sums, and provide a concrete example for the first semester calculus student.
And to address your comment specifically, i feel much richer having computers to learn math. We played with trig functions on the apple, and our ancient TI calculators, and it really helped me remember how they were related. Twenty years ago. I guess that is why the people from my public high school were making near perfect scores on the SAT.
The debt is more a control and transparency issue. Like other countries, we can just keep borrowing to pay the interest, so defaulting is not an issue.
First, around 3 trillion dollars of the debt is intragovernment. That is, the government borrows from the money that is needed to pay the house insurance at the end of the year to pay the light bill now. All of us that have had to do this know it is a dangerous game. Although many say we can always borrow more money to extend term with creditors, this part of the debt has not been borrowed.
The rest, exceeding $4 trillion and approaching 5, is held publicly. The figures I have seen indicate that foreign ownership is approaching 50%. Now, I don't know who many of you are in debt, but if you are you know the people who you owe money to own you. It the 70's the citizens of the US own the country. Now Japan does. I am not being chauvinistic, just realistic. If we owe several billion dollars to someone, then we are not going to do a lot to piss that person off. We may act macho in the UN, or shake out fists in Iraq, but that is mostly just our temper tantrums because we cannot have everything we want.
Currently the US appears to be taxing at 15% of GDP and spending at 20%. Our lifestyle depends on other countries lending us money. We are no longer our own man.
Repeat carefully after me. Security through obscurity is not a bad thing. It can and is part of a well thought out security plan. This is why it is often useful to spoof you MAC address, or browser name, or OS. Keeping some information from the criminals is useful.
The problems manifest when obscurity becomes your primary defense. As long as we write portble HTML and keep out demands reasonable, then on the internet we can switch browsers at will. The problem is that many schools have fallen to idea of "cheap" code and made all web access dependent on IE, which was and is stupid. If they now make code Gecko dependent, that would be equally stupid.
It is not about trust. It is about boundaries and reminding children that boundaries exist. As has already been mentioned this will do nothing for the kid that is actively trying to defy the parents, rather than just testing boundary and getting attention. However for the young driver the phone might be an effective gentle reminder that expectations exist, and the child is required to abide. Obviously this might only be used for the first several months of driving.
The old way of doing this was having the child drive a barely functional car, or no car at all. However modern parents do not like the risk such a vehicle imposes, or would be embarrassed to see their child in such a car, or would be embarrassed if the child had no car. So this is a good solution.
Many parent will use it as an excuse not to talk or communicate or teach. This is unfortunate. But it does not mean the tool is not useful. Frankly, few children are going to do the right thing without some training and limitations. This is not cynical, just knowing how children are. They are curios to know if boundries are real, and feel more confortable if some concrete checks exist. If for nothing else that resist peer pressure.
In a way the parent and grandparent have valid points, but both miss the mark on exactly what was originally discussed, and the issue that we as consumers face when using product benchmarks.
It is true that CR is less biased because manufacturers are not able to ship customized or specially selected units. However, as was mentioned, that does not stop manufacturers from engineering and shipping products that meet those requirements, even at the expense of other requirements that may be equally beneficial.
The validity of either argument depends on one's point of view. If the point of the test is a pissing contest, then telling the manufacturer that the unit will be tested is important. This allows the manufacturer to ship the best possible unit. Clearly any manufacturer can ship a single unit that is of much better quality than the average unit. However, if the point is to give the consumer an indication of how an average unit will perform, then it is important to acquire the product using the same methods as the consumer. After all, the average consumer is not going to be able to go to the manufacturer and demand an equal part as used in the formal testing labs.
one final point. The manufacturers will adjust the products to meet the testing standards. This is in fact the point of testing, to give manufacturers a metric to meet. Therefore the metric should reflect the performance and safety needs of the consumer. If the metric does not, then the testing labs are at fault. Also, manufacturers need time to meet new standards. This is what the issue was with CR testing SUVs for roll overs. There was nothing wrong with methodology, however they did not give the manufacturers time to meet those new standards. Up until that point it was not a big issue, and many of us thought good riddance to those who do not understand energy management.
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The real problem with DVDs is having to go through the agony of watching all the warnings, ads, and amatuer animation, before being allowed to watch the movie that one has duly licensed. This agony clearly drives consumers to the P2P networks to acquire a copy that just allows us to watch the movie, without 5 minutes of 'value added content'.
Why is this anymore scary than American oil interests setting policy in places like Nigeria or Iraq or many other number of countries. Or America killing it's own people in brutal and often unnecessary standoffs.
I have said it before and I will say it again, and I will get labeled a troll. Over the entire history the USA has proven it willingness to acquire military force and use the overwhelming advantage to destroy anyone who opposes it. This is no different from the superpowers that preceded it. Therefore, anyone that pisses off the US, or cuts a special deal with the US, and then is surprised when the US acts with overwhelming force, is in a dreamland. It is probably not right, it is probably not a healthy way to exist, but it is not surprising.
When the FBI comes in and annihilates a group of people that has been taunting the US government, this is not surprising. When the military comes in and bombs a a city back to the dark ages, killing untold number of civilians, this is not surprising. When the US policy makers create a system that will allow a retail chain to create a class of indentured servants, this is not surprising.
Many of us believe this is wrong, and are trying to change it. But this is the way it is right now. If you want change, use your wallet and your feet. The system only works because consumers buy the products of the people who want to oppress us. Stealing *AA products is not going to help. Buying non-*AA might. Complaining that an illegal warehouse has been raiding is not going to help. Help creating a competing counter culture might.
Complaining about this when international humanitarian rights are being violated on a daily basis is just narcissistic beyond belief. Corporate music and video is not a basic human right. Try to make you won jam.
Their coffee is something special. It is an enhanced drug delivery system, supplying about 25% more caffeine than the average cup of coffee. If the customers have gotten used to that level of caffeine, above 500 mg for venti, other products would not provide the same relief. Noting the tiny people that seem to frequent starbucks, the dosage might be 10 mg/kg. The LD_50 for caffeine might be as low as 150mg/kg. I get worried when I see a parent buying their preteen kid a latte.
The thing is we do sometimes have a choice. We don't have a choice about EULA, since they are everywhere. The courts have to fix it. But we do have a choice if we wish to be treated like a criminal at the places we spend money. Target does not treat me like a criminal. Walgreens does not treat me like a criminal. I may choose to 'save' money by shopping at walmart in exchange for giving up certain rights. That is my choice, and I can't really blame anyone else for the consequences of that choice.
As far as saving stuff, I suspect I would have every student get a $20 USB drive. OTOH, the review is clearly trying to select the truth that fits. Every eMac comes with a combo drive which can write CDs. The high end model had a superdrive with can write DVDs. I don't suspect either would happen on a regular basis, and I would set up limited accounts for the students that had this feature disabled
The same goes for the harddrive. Most data for studets should be stored on thier own media. In my days we each had our own 5 1/4. If I collect assesment data, this is stored on a network sever, often offsite at the company we contract with. The harddrive holds only applications. And since this is not a windows machine in which the kids will be constantly downloading virus, spyware, and games, the hard disk can be small.
For a family looking for a cheap computer, this may not be the ideal choice. For a school, the fact that I can manage the classroom by diableing certain features, that I do not have to worry about kids downloading virus and spyware, and the fact that it is a sturdy one piece machine makes it great choice.
It really is ridiculous. For instance, Ames was suspected or treason twenty years ago, and it took 10 years to prove it. In the end, this man who compromised our country to an unknown degree, and contributed to the death of several Americans, got life in prison. In a country where our president would kill a man if he accidently shot a clerk during a robbery. And we never heard of Ames being harassed or fired.
Compare this to some of the non-white workers in the US. There was recently a story about a couple who was fired from their non-classified government research job, for no apparent reason. Oh, they may have once attended a legal but questionable party hosted by a questionable organization. And the case of the researcher who was fired and jailed on evidence that later proved nonexistent. His life destroyed by bigoted investigators, of the same organization that allowed Ames to kill 10 patriotic agents. Madness.
Now this gravy train is gone. A consumer only needs to buy one copy of the song, and then mix and match it into any collection. A label can no longer put out a collection of 4 golden oldies and 10 pieces of crap and expect to get paid $20. The consumer can now duplicate the same album for nothing, or, if feeling generous, a few dollars on iTunes.
The labels can no longer expect to make huge profits when the next audio format is introduced. The current format is MP3, which will not generate the profits that the CD did because everyone, like myself, just converted the music at home. Whatever the next format is will likely generate equally disappointing sales.
So all this is to put a lifetime on the music. To insure that the next generation will have to buy old music. Without this planned obsolesce of the recording, the labels are in a hopeless situation.
In fact the product is windows only because it is
Which frankly is and has been the MS Windows philosophy.
This is why. If I set up thunder as the email client, and then firefox as the web client, that leads to more choices, and choices are what often cause significant security problems for the average user. Perhpas they will open IE instead of firefox. If the web window is already open, then the use of IE will be less likely.
So, in a setting in which the inherently insecure features of IE are not needed, running mozilla is one way to keep IE from being run. The user will load up moz for email, and continue for web browsing.
This is really why windows was used so much in the 90's. The computer were relatively cheap. The software was easy to acquire for little cash. The stability compared to other platforms was irrelevant because software for other platforms was harder to get. Money spent on software was not seen an investment to build the business.
Absolutely. We don't want the ignorant masses on /. . (dot dot...dot) We don't want those foul evil MS users to sully up out space. We would never want them to know that there was software before MS, and there will be software after MS. We don't want them to know the *nix is not just an alternative, but the granddaddy. And we certainly don't want them to know that the MS tax is optional.
So many of the phones are sold as a cheap thing you can throw away when your contract runs out(now a draconian two years), or a feature ladened behemeth that you can impress your freinds with. Motorola still seems to be the company that will produce quality irrespective of a price point.
The later findings are corroborated by any number of respected books and television shows. By comparison, Eek! was intellectually devoid, and no significant assertions about the nature of life were ever made, other than the obvious lesson that no good deed goes unpunished.
For upper management stock options, if not backed by zero-percent loans shill loans, can clearly build loyalty to a company. For the average employee stock options are nothing but a way to externalize labor costs in an effort to manufactur profit. It also can put an employee in serious financial and tax trouble since the average person is ill able to navigate the financial landscape without a good advisors. The advisors, of course, are often paid for by the firm, and employee stock options are sometimes used as a cheap way to keep the market cap up.
This has been too long coming. As berkshie-hathawy stated, I believe in last years report, transparency dictates the stock option be used intentialy, and be reported. A significant part of the dot com fantasy of free money was stock options, and it is one it's last remnants.
One can also see this with keyboards. Many PC ship with 10 or more extra keys to execute specilized commands. While this may be useful for a small subset, it annoys me that the extra keys make the keyboard bigger than it has to be and it causes confusion. For instance, on my compaq laptop there is a row a ancillary buttons across the top. The most important button, the start up button, is just one these buttons, barely differentiated. Everytime I want to turn on the machine I must look for the button. Time wasted because someone wanted to look technologically advanced by including lots of buttons.
The phone I want from apple has the structure of iPod mini, but much smaller. No keyboard, no speaker, no mic. Bluetooth to a headset. Scrollwheel selects person to call. Sync to adress book and datebook. If the networks would get full caller ID, like the bells, numbers could be stored with names. In fact I have often wondered how hard it would be add phone capability to the mini, and, of course, bluetooth.
The keyboard on a phone is useful for texting, but a popup keyboard and the scrollwheel could be just as useful, expecially with predictive technology and a phrase bank. I will never buy a phone in which the data cannot be gathered from my laptop. The current cellphone is evolved from 70's technology. It is time for something different.
Of course, no mention was made of the fact that when the kids turn on the TV the US is once agian using violence to solve problems. The president ordered the death of more people in texas than any other governor anywhere. The diplomacy of the state departmen has been trumped by the needs of the military.
Kids learn to kill and that killing is ok from many different sources. What is missing is the lessons on who to deal with problems peacefully. The continuing subtext that only the weak need diplomacy just makes it that much more likely that a kid is going torture and murder an advesary. This is expecially true when the would be killer has to prove he or she is not weak.
If you are going to break in, you will just cover the camera. The value of things bought from the kiosk can't be that much. And the hope of catching a mailer of pipe bomb or laced letter must be nil. People are sending laced letters because it is the only thing you can put in an anonymous letter box.
This is worse than not allowing men to wear hats in a bank. Is every women in a shawl going to be a suspect. Is every man in a large coat going to be arrested. Next thing you know they are going to deman that everyone must be topless to buy a stamp. That would make the sicko government officials happpy. Fratboys in every level of government, a keg party on the capital.
What happened is that there was this free 'upgrade' for this teevee that you already paid for. As long as you bought a new teevee every year, you also got the free upgrade. The other compliant stuff was still out there, but this non-compliant upgrade was specialy designed for the teevee, and you were told that if you did not use the certified upgrade you would be audited and fined triple damages.
You bought the new teevee, you got the extra stuff. You could use the old free stuff with old teevee, but that again might bring an audit.
If the cost of education and monitoring is too great, then MS should suggest the customer buy non-MS solutions.
Problem solved.
What we do in the US is pretty interesting. We expect every one of our citizens to learn math. And not just math, but advanced abstract concepts like irrational numbers and numbers that don't even exist. If you doubt how hard these things are to understand, just note that in the western world there was a long time between the greeks, with their straight edge, protractor, and rational numbers, to the point where we could solve irrational equations and develop a general 'algebra'.
In the fantasy world, everyone has always learned math. In the real world, people did learn their times tables, and could handle rational numbers, and perhaps those skills have gone, but when dealing with high school algebra, that has always been issue. My father talked about teaching kids in the 60's and realizing they never learned to measure. In fact we did good things by exposing the masses to the ideas, and allowing those who could progress to do so, but we did very little in developing abstract thought in the rest.
Which for better or worse is the current mandate of education in the US. Th modern industrial complex requires two types of people. Drones that have interpersonal skills and can work a computer, and drones that can accept a general set of instruction to either solve a problem or create a procedure that other drones can use to solve a problem. There are few position available for the worker that has traditionally been the product of the US educational system.
So, how do we do this by the time a student reaches 18. This can be hard as many people do not develop the ability to think abstractly until nearly 18. Under the current system, we start teaching abstract thought at 14 or before. One device is mask the abstract thought in concrete objects and hope the concepts transfer when the pupil has sufficiently developed. One effective way to do this is with the computer. The computer can handle the complex, often abstract calculation, while the pupil can learn by observing the cause and effect of the actions. For instance, the pupil can solve an abstract equation by naming the operations, and the computer can correctly apply the operations. Likewise, the public can put specific points that are a solution to an equation, and the computer can verify the validity of those points, and when appropriately, allow the student to fit a curve. In more advance math, the computer can model Reiman sums, and provide a concrete example for the first semester calculus student.
And to address your comment specifically, i feel much richer having computers to learn math. We played with trig functions on the apple, and our ancient TI calculators, and it really helped me remember how they were related. Twenty years ago. I guess that is why the people from my public high school were making near perfect scores on the SAT.
First, around 3 trillion dollars of the debt is intragovernment. That is, the government borrows from the money that is needed to pay the house insurance at the end of the year to pay the light bill now. All of us that have had to do this know it is a dangerous game. Although many say we can always borrow more money to extend term with creditors, this part of the debt has not been borrowed.
The rest, exceeding $4 trillion and approaching 5, is held publicly. The figures I have seen indicate that foreign ownership is approaching 50%. Now, I don't know who many of you are in debt, but if you are you know the people who you owe money to own you. It the 70's the citizens of the US own the country. Now Japan does. I am not being chauvinistic, just realistic. If we owe several billion dollars to someone, then we are not going to do a lot to piss that person off. We may act macho in the UN, or shake out fists in Iraq, but that is mostly just our temper tantrums because we cannot have everything we want.
Currently the US appears to be taxing at 15% of GDP and spending at 20%. Our lifestyle depends on other countries lending us money. We are no longer our own man.
they will remove current funding from the CS department, or base future licenses on the reccomended use of IE.
The problems manifest when obscurity becomes your primary defense. As long as we write portble HTML and keep out demands reasonable, then on the internet we can switch browsers at will. The problem is that many schools have fallen to idea of "cheap" code and made all web access dependent on IE, which was and is stupid. If they now make code Gecko dependent, that would be equally stupid.
The old way of doing this was having the child drive a barely functional car, or no car at all. However modern parents do not like the risk such a vehicle imposes, or would be embarrassed to see their child in such a car, or would be embarrassed if the child had no car. So this is a good solution.
Many parent will use it as an excuse not to talk or communicate or teach. This is unfortunate. But it does not mean the tool is not useful. Frankly, few children are going to do the right thing without some training and limitations. This is not cynical, just knowing how children are. They are curios to know if boundries are real, and feel more confortable if some concrete checks exist. If for nothing else that resist peer pressure.
It is true that CR is less biased because manufacturers are not able to ship customized or specially selected units. However, as was mentioned, that does not stop manufacturers from engineering and shipping products that meet those requirements, even at the expense of other requirements that may be equally beneficial.
The validity of either argument depends on one's point of view. If the point of the test is a pissing contest, then telling the manufacturer that the unit will be tested is important. This allows the manufacturer to ship the best possible unit. Clearly any manufacturer can ship a single unit that is of much better quality than the average unit. However, if the point is to give the consumer an indication of how an average unit will perform, then it is important to acquire the product using the same methods as the consumer. After all, the average consumer is not going to be able to go to the manufacturer and demand an equal part as used in the formal testing labs.
one final point. The manufacturers will adjust the products to meet the testing standards. This is in fact the point of testing, to give manufacturers a metric to meet. Therefore the metric should reflect the performance and safety needs of the consumer. If the metric does not, then the testing labs are at fault. Also, manufacturers need time to meet new standards. This is what the issue was with CR testing SUVs for roll overs. There was nothing wrong with methodology, however they did not give the manufacturers time to meet those new standards. Up until that point it was not a big issue, and many of us thought good riddance to those who do not understand energy management.