Equally important is that the batteries are replaceable and generic. It's easy to carry an extra one with you (if being musicless is going to be a crisis for you, that is), and you can buy them anywhere.
People buy these things cause it's "cool" to have an Ipod.
Sigh... I just had to buy one for my girlfriend's birthday. She didn't care about specs or anything like that. It just had to be an Ipod; no substitutions, please. That said though, it is a cute little device, and it saved me the bother of my typically hyper-anal comparison shopping...
Unfortunately, most Windows & Mac users expect to be graphically entertained during even the most basic operations, no matter how much bloat that involves. All you really need is to copy files from one filesystem to another; everything else is fluff.
Having a higher level "bios" which sits on top of the manufacturer's, is stored in flash ram and gives additionnal functionnalities might be more realistic.
It would also defeat the whole purpose. One big concern here is about stealth functionality in the BIOS; i.e., behavior that is intended to limit your access to your own machine or - worse - to collect information behind your back. Putting a pretty wrapper around a black-box BIOS accomplishes exactly nothing.
How would cooperating to create "free" BIOS help Intel?
There: You've just underlined the need for an Open Source BIOS yourself. Why would any company consider the interests of its customers if there's no obvious, immediate profit in it? And if they wouldn't, why would you trust their proprietary, closed-source software?
What can it gain by winning over a bunch of geeks?
Because the Geeks are the ones who advise everybody else on what motherboard to buy.
It's very nice that you're supporting a family, but that fact no more gives you the right to steal other people's code than it gives me to rob the local convenience store. If you want to own proprietary code, the way to do that is to write it yourself - and license it as restrictively as you wish - or buy it from someone who has already done that. That's the way it worked before the GPL, and that's the way it works still.
As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080
Suppose the screen is 10 meters wide. Then each of those 2048 pixels are going to be about 5mm square, which I think would be fairly noticable from anywhere near the front of the theater...
The idea being that if an RNG was programmed to avoid producing the same number repeatedly, it wasn't really generating random output.
For a simple (e.g., no shuffling) random number generator that uses its previous output as the seed for the next one, to repeat once is to repeat forever. Of course, we rarely use the raw output of an RNG directly; usually you'd take a modulus to map it to a discrete set of possible values (e.g., 0..9). In that case you're just as likely to repeat as to get any other particular value.
As someone else has already pointed out, you can severely limit what Javascript is allowed to do in your preferences. In Mozilla at least, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Scripts&Plugins and uncheck everything you don't want. Then you won't have to "get it" either...
Theatrical releases and DVD/VCR releases are frequently different. This has nothing to do with Blockbuster.
Isn't Blockbuster the #1 buyer of DVD releases? How can you say then that it "has nothing to do with Blockbuster"? The studios are delivering to Blockbuster exactly what Blockbuster wants to buy. It isn't necessary for Blockbuster to "censor" the DVDs itself, and in fact it would be stupid for them to do things that way when the studios are willing to do it free of charge. If Blockbuster wanted the actual theatrical versions, they would certainly get them.
Alas, most censorship in the U.S. works this way. It just happens, and there is no censor.
that entire 332 page PDF the word "wireless" is mentioned exactly . . . 4 times . . yes a Whopping Four Times!
And just how many times does a word have to be mentioned in a bill before it becomes meaningful? Actually the bill appears to ban municipalities from offering network services of any kind, including wireless.
You are obviously very familiar with the bill, and it's hard not to conlcude that you have an interest in misleading people about what it will do. Do you?
Yes, you're right. There is a Vast Liberal Conspiracy among all scientists around the world to produce results that inconvenience Good Old Conservative Ideology. The indoctrination is done with surreptitious mind control in the first year of graduate studies in all scientific disciplines. Thank God the secret is finally out.
But not to worry. Despite the Bushie's insistence that "more research is needed", the new federal budget cuts back sharply on climate research. Funding for the Climate Reference Network was eliminated completely, and NOAA took a 44% reduction for climate research. More research may indeed be needed, but they're not going to risk letting it happen.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
So you read George Will's column too; he quoted a single article from Science Magazine in the 70s speculating about the possibility of another Ice Age. Here's a news flash: Even if that represented consensus scientific opinion at the time (and it didn't), the fact that scientific thought changes over time is a strength, not a weakness. Maybe your understanding of the universe comes from Theology rather than Science, but even the Roman Catholic Church ultimately apologized to Galileo (like, 10 years ago!). George Will knows better, or at least should. Reading that column convinced me that the "culture war" being waged by conservatives is no less than a War on Reason itself.
If the law says you can't tax interstate commerce then that is the way it is.
But it's not really interstate commerce that's being taxed here. Residents of Michigan (and most other states) are required to pay the tax on their consumption of cigarettes regardless of where they are purchased. I.e., purchases out-of-state are not treated any differently than purchases in-state. Now if the tax only applied to out-of-state purchases (like an import duty), or were higher in that case, then that would be a different story...
Even so, I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time proving that the cigarettes were consumed at all.
Prosecution? Nobody's been charged with a crime; they've just been told to pay the taxes that are owed. The woman quoted in the article figured that she'll still break even after paying them.
But that aside, you must live in a fantasy world if you think that the courts are going to put up with crap like your suggested "defenses"...
In my opinion, many of the non-mainstream groups produce better music.
You're absolutely right. Great music is coming from all over the world, but remains obscure because it doesn't get the promotion that the corporate packages get. The real revolution will come when people - and I'm talking especially to you, kids! - start buying music because it's good, not because it's famous.
why are discussions relating to ecology so highly politicized in the US?
It goes further than just the politicization of science. In the big picture, what we are experiencing in the U.S. is beginning to look like a concerted war on Reason itself. Henceforth it will all be about Faith. Faith in what? Why, whatever the New Trinity of government, business, and organized religion may require of us.
I would be angry if my local government did something like this.
I'm just thankful that municipal water systems were put in before the advent of the bottled water industry. Otherwise it never could have happened, and we'd all be showering and washing our clothes in Dasani...
This "security" problems are being orchestrated by the higher up Neocons so they have an excuse to drop the University of California as their administrator and so they can contract it out to one of the Military-Industrial companies
This seems pretty obvious to me as well. I remember reading about how all research at Los Alamos was suspended as the official response to what seemed like a fairly minor lapse, and thinking that something else must be going on in the big picture. It looks even more that way now.
Apple makes a ridiculously low profit, like 1 cent per song sold.
Don't look at profit per song, because digital music is an intangible that can be duplicated and distributed almost costlessly. Instead, look at their total revenues against their total costs, and their return on capital.
Most songs, aside from the really good ones, suck after about three years
So there's the sales pitch: "You don't really want to own your music, because it sucks anyway! Why not rent your sucky music from us? That way it can only suck as long as we let you listen to it!"
If you never end your subscription you really don't lose out.
Well, that's precisely the point, isn't it? If you never end your subscription, at whatever rates they may choose to charge you in the future, and on whatever terms. Why own a house, then? If you rent for your entire life, you'll still have a place to live.
I bought a lot more CDs when I was younger than I do now, but I can still listen to anything in my collection - whenever, wherever, however, and with whomever I want - without paying tribute to anybody for their permission to do so. Give that up, and it's just another way that we're all being chumped these days.
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Equally important is that the batteries are replaceable and generic. It's easy to carry an extra one with you (if being musicless is going to be a crisis for you, that is), and you can buy them anywhere.
Sigh... I just had to buy one for my girlfriend's birthday. She didn't care about specs or anything like that. It just had to be an Ipod; no substitutions, please. That said though, it is a cute little device, and it saved me the bother of my typically hyper-anal comparison shopping...
Unfortunately, most Windows & Mac users expect to be graphically entertained during even the most basic operations, no matter how much bloat that involves. All you really need is to copy files from one filesystem to another; everything else is fluff.
It would also defeat the whole purpose. One big concern here is about stealth functionality in the BIOS; i.e., behavior that is intended to limit your access to your own machine or - worse - to collect information behind your back. Putting a pretty wrapper around a black-box BIOS accomplishes exactly nothing.
There: You've just underlined the need for an Open Source BIOS yourself. Why would any company consider the interests of its customers if there's no obvious, immediate profit in it? And if they wouldn't, why would you trust their proprietary, closed-source software?
What can it gain by winning over a bunch of geeks?
Because the Geeks are the ones who advise everybody else on what motherboard to buy.
It's very nice that you're supporting a family, but that fact no more gives you the right to steal other people's code than it gives me to rob the local convenience store. If you want to own proprietary code, the way to do that is to write it yourself - and license it as restrictively as you wish - or buy it from someone who has already done that. That's the way it worked before the GPL, and that's the way it works still.
Or more to the point, can you really save a show by subsidizing its production? If it doesn't draw advertisers, they're still not going to show it...
Personally, I would have named it "Granny Smith"...
Suppose the screen is 10 meters wide. Then each of those 2048 pixels are going to be about 5mm square, which I think would be fairly noticable from anywhere near the front of the theater...
For a simple (e.g., no shuffling) random number generator that uses its previous output as the seed for the next one, to repeat once is to repeat forever. Of course, we rarely use the raw output of an RNG directly; usually you'd take a modulus to map it to a discrete set of possible values (e.g., 0..9). In that case you're just as likely to repeat as to get any other particular value.
As someone else has already pointed out, you can severely limit what Javascript is allowed to do in your preferences. In Mozilla at least, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Scripts&Plugins and uncheck everything you don't want. Then you won't have to "get it" either...
Yes, please stop questioning our Benevolent Corporate Overlords. Don't you realize that Welfare Mothers are driving Cadillacs?
Isn't Blockbuster the #1 buyer of DVD releases? How can you say then that it "has nothing to do with Blockbuster"? The studios are delivering to Blockbuster exactly what Blockbuster wants to buy. It isn't necessary for Blockbuster to "censor" the DVDs itself, and in fact it would be stupid for them to do things that way when the studios are willing to do it free of charge. If Blockbuster wanted the actual theatrical versions, they would certainly get them.
Alas, most censorship in the U.S. works this way. It just happens, and there is no censor.
And just how many times does a word have to be mentioned in a bill before it becomes meaningful? Actually the bill appears to ban municipalities from offering network services of any kind, including wireless.
You are obviously very familiar with the bill, and it's hard not to conlcude that you have an interest in misleading people about what it will do. Do you?
But not to worry. Despite the Bushie's insistence that "more research is needed", the new federal budget cuts back sharply on climate research. Funding for the Climate Reference Network was eliminated completely, and NOAA took a 44% reduction for climate research. More research may indeed be needed, but they're not going to risk letting it happen.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
So you read George Will's column too; he quoted a single article from Science Magazine in the 70s speculating about the possibility of another Ice Age. Here's a news flash: Even if that represented consensus scientific opinion at the time (and it didn't), the fact that scientific thought changes over time is a strength, not a weakness. Maybe your understanding of the universe comes from Theology rather than Science, but even the Roman Catholic Church ultimately apologized to Galileo (like, 10 years ago!). George Will knows better, or at least should. Reading that column convinced me that the "culture war" being waged by conservatives is no less than a War on Reason itself.
But it's not really interstate commerce that's being taxed here. Residents of Michigan (and most other states) are required to pay the tax on their consumption of cigarettes regardless of where they are purchased. I.e., purchases out-of-state are not treated any differently than purchases in-state. Now if the tax only applied to out-of-state purchases (like an import duty), or were higher in that case, then that would be a different story...
Prosecution? Nobody's been charged with a crime; they've just been told to pay the taxes that are owed. The woman quoted in the article figured that she'll still break even after paying them.
But that aside, you must live in a fantasy world if you think that the courts are going to put up with crap like your suggested "defenses"...
You're absolutely right. Great music is coming from all over the world, but remains obscure because it doesn't get the promotion that the corporate packages get. The real revolution will come when people - and I'm talking especially to you, kids! - start buying music because it's good, not because it's famous.
It goes further than just the politicization of science. In the big picture, what we are experiencing in the U.S. is beginning to look like a concerted war on Reason itself. Henceforth it will all be about Faith. Faith in what? Why, whatever the New Trinity of government, business, and organized religion may require of us.
I'm just thankful that municipal water systems were put in before the advent of the bottled water industry. Otherwise it never could have happened, and we'd all be showering and washing our clothes in Dasani...
This seems pretty obvious to me as well. I remember reading about how all research at Los Alamos was suspended as the official response to what seemed like a fairly minor lapse, and thinking that something else must be going on in the big picture. It looks even more that way now.
Don't look at profit per song, because digital music is an intangible that can be duplicated and distributed almost costlessly. Instead, look at their total revenues against their total costs, and their return on capital.
So there's the sales pitch: "You don't really want to own your music, because it sucks anyway! Why not rent your sucky music from us? That way it can only suck as long as we let you listen to it!"
Yeah... I think we're seeing a lot of astroturfing here today. It's a revenue opportunity for young, hip, cool "opinion leaders".
Well, that's precisely the point, isn't it? If you never end your subscription, at whatever rates they may choose to charge you in the future, and on whatever terms. Why own a house, then? If you rent for your entire life, you'll still have a place to live.
I bought a lot more CDs when I was younger than I do now, but I can still listen to anything in my collection - whenever, wherever, however, and with whomever I want - without paying tribute to anybody for their permission to do so. Give that up, and it's just another way that we're all being chumped these days.