I had a few problems with Dell. (Admittedly I can't judge whether these are common). First issue was low-quality parts. I had to have them replace the CD writer several times - yes it was under warranty, but in the end I gave up and installed better equipment. Second was upgrading - the case was an absolute nightmare, no two parts were installed in the same way (one drive in a drive cage which needed to be disassembled to get to the drive, another standing on it's head, held by screw which was under the front cover). The BIOS was weird, the RAM used was an unusual configuration etc.
I think I may have been unlucky with that machine, and probably Dell usually delivers better stuff. However there is a general problem there: when I buy the machine ready-made I don't control the parts. Some parts may be good quality, some will probably be crap.
When I build a machine myself I have control over the parts I pick and I have documentation on everything. The initial costs are probably roughly the same and I have to put in a bit of work, too. However once it gets to upgrading things become a lot easier - I have picked a case which gives me easy access to the components, I have space to put in additional cards, the hard drives are easy to replace etc. I think this is the point at which you can save money, too - you can just replace a few things to keep the machine up-to-date vs buying a new one.
Whining about the EU is one thing but opting to stay out or leaving... Whining has no consequences, but once you decide to leave or to stay out you need to face the hard reality that almost everybody inside will be better off than you. Also of course - as long as a country is in the EU, its government can blame all those tough decisions on the EU - "they make us do that". Nothing quite as convenient for a politician as that.
It's no wonder that some countries are not joining the EU.
There are countries left which don't want to join? Which ones (apart from Norway and Switzerland)? Turkey is not even on the same continent (ok half of Istanbul is). The way things are going an application by Brazil or Taiwan wouldn't surprise me anymore...
Is that sentence really so difficult to understand? Increasing productivity means to get more output per employee. This does not necesseraly mean the output goes into a single project. As the article states:... we found that heavier IT users are much heavier multitaskers, so over time, they're completing more projects and bringing in more money for the firm.
What is it with the US and double-speak these days? Words have meaning, why do they need to be re-defined until they become empty shells?
Bullying can include torture. Verbal abuse is just that: verbal abuse, and it's not torture. The next thing is that children are by defintion not adults. If there are seperate laws for children and for adults, then children can never ever be convicted as adults.
On the prison thing - this is the typical knee-jerk "law and order" approach. The US has an absurd number of adults in prison already (higher than any other western country), and still it's crime rate is higher than any other western country. It's easy to advocate "get tough on crime" policies, but experience has shown that these do not work. I don't blame anyone for thinking in the first place that this might work - it's not an unreasonable assumption. However once you've seen it fails you got to think of something else, you can't repeat the same thing and hope the results will change.
Not really, the action itself already excludes the possibility that he is a G-man with a conscience. If he was he'd respect the limits imposed on him by the law which he is supposed to uphold. You cannot serve the law by breaking it.
Well - the argument in the summary is that P2P can't possibly lose more sales than the number of downloads made. Hence the remaining portion of the decline (74 million CDs) can not be blamed on P2P. This still allows for the possibility that P2P itself generates sales, but that this benefit is offset by other factors (e.g. poor quality and high price). It would theoretically be possible that these other factors cost 90 million in lost sales, while P2P would enable 10 million sales which would otherwise not happen. Using the number of downloads can only put a cap on the possible damage, it can not estimate possible benefits.
However the linked article mentions additional methods the study uses - it observes times in which downloads are increasing, and finds that CD purchases do not suffer during these periods. Using this they make a stronger claim and state that the net effect of downloading is zero.
Why the bias in favor of strict controls over individual actions?
Cause individual actions have so far failed to work. If they hadn't we wouldn't even need this discussion.
On top of that, there is the mathematical problem of the prisoner's dilema. If company A and B would increase cost and reduce carbon emissions, all would be better off. However if just company A does it, people will buy from company B and A will be broke. (Vice versa if B does it.) People invented rules and governments to address that fundamental problem.
Ok, lets say the world is warming up. Is that bad? Seriously, is that really bad?
Probably - humans have adapted their settlements to the areas they live in. Change in their environments means that their agriculture and housing won't be suited anymore.
E.g. lots of people live in coastal areas, if the sea level rises (which is relatively likely) that means they'll lose their houses and land. On the other hand inland areas which are dry could become even drier - people there might not be able to grow food anymore.
Of course, earth may well stabilize itself in a few thousand years, and humans as a species might survice that, too. (Why not - we survived the ice age, after all.) However the economic and humanitarian costs of such an adjustment would be gigantic. It would seem to make sense to come up with strategies to avoid this scenario in the first place. There is really no need to put that much CO2 into the atmosphere.
There is a danger in putting too tight limits on people after they have served their time. If you prohibit them from doing anything at all, eventually they'll have no choice but to break the law. There is already a vast range of jobs which require people to use computers, banning released convicts from owning computers prevents them from acquiring the skills to work in these jobs. (Likewise it would make no sense to prohibit them from owning computers, but to allow them to work on other people's computers - they might use those for nefarious purposes too, so the restriction would be pointless.)
Logic dictates that the universe did not make itself. Every effect demands a cause. The effect of the universe and by extension, we humans, has a first cause, which itself must be uncaused.
This is certainly not true, since your argument contradicts itself immediately. If you say that every effect demands a cause, then you've already eliminated the possibility of a first cause. On the other hand if you do allow a first cause, then any first cause is permissible. There is no particular reason to assume that it was an intelligent being.
Some religious types seem to have difficulties understanding that insisting everybody has to take their fairy tales as fact is just as offensive to others, as it is for them to be told they are fairy tales. So turnabout is fair play, ok?
Humans can create live, usually a process called sex is involved. God can't create anything, due to his lack of existence. Governments are structures created by humans, getting those right or wrong has a lot to do with the rights people actually have. Also - no matter what the writers of the declaration of independence thought - there is no biblical basis for the concept of rights. So even if you do believe in a christian god - rights don't come from god. Even if you do believe in god, there is no biblical justification for thinking humans can't reproduce without his intervention.
The thing is - if you have the right to elect your government democratically you are then also responsible for it's actions. Fact is that John Howard was elected, and Australia is one of the countries which have enabled Bush to start his war of aggression against Iraq.
I can see you are frustrated about John Howard, but lots of Americans are frustrated about Bush, too. The GP's point that Australian society was inherently better at avoiding useless wars does not hold - both have failed in the case of Iraq.
There is really nothing in e.g. the bible which gives rights to anyone. The European convention on human rights (as a random example) has given rights to people who didn't have them before, various constitutions have done the same. "The Creator"? Stop giving credit to your imaginary friend for things which other people accomplished.
A terminal which is sophisticated enough to allow online-purchases would allow to view illegal websites in the same manner, so I fail to see what your solution actually accomplishes. Admittedly I know of no case of law enforcement monitoring people who use terminals, considering there are almost no people who use these in a home setting that seems irrelevant.
Nobody has been arrested for playing on a console, but there are many people who play games on PCs. Sure theoretically they could buy some special printer, use some special graphics display, buy a console and so on. You have a snowballs chance in hell in actually getting anyone to go to that trouble.
Does it really take a PC to send a photograph to someone? No.
Yes.
Can you send a picture to someone over the Internet if you have a graphic display terminal instead of a PC? Yes.
No.
I know, sure you can do anything with a graphics terminal. As long as that terminal has a USB port, allows you to upload and download things and store them somewhere (e.g. to your mp3 player). As long as that terminal is in fact indistinguishable from a PC. Apart from having no local drive on which the user could store his photographs, his emails and his mp3s.
After all this, I'm really unclear now what you are trying to do? Which specific problem would actually be solved by your proposal, and how would you convince people to go for your solution?
Ok, so you have a browser, but then you are hardly streaming content - the user selects their websites and while there is nothing on the harddrive (assuming there is no browser cache) there are still logs at the provider side. So you can still be prosecuted for going to illegal websites, and there is still an incentive for law enforcement to monitor everybody. The whole plugin-stuff allows hacking, too - you can use prepared plugins to monitor the users actions (while online banking for example). Or use any other hole in the browser.
As for the photo stuff - people want to send their photographs to other users.
Oh and online games, people use computers for gaming.
One possible motivation would be to use it as a cover. If they managed to actually drop illegal images on large numbers of machines, it would become very hard to prosecute anyone for possession.
Maybe once they had distributed the files sufficiently they'd alert the authorities and let them start work on the innocent. Once a few high-profile cases collapse (maybe you'd pick a 16 year-old child to increase media attention) you'd have a plausible defence - evil hackers put it there. Very wild speculation, I admit.
I disagree. The majority of users have little grasps on the working of an OS, but there are many non-streaming things they want to do with their PC, like chatting, online-banking or editing images taking with the digital camera. They want to build web pages and they want to send email. If that wasn't true how would you explain myspace, all these email viruses and chain mails?
Consider the effect this law has had - it's nothing but a recruiting tool for revisionists. If you need a law to prevent someone from disagreeing with you, it smells fishy, it seems like you are not telling the truth. It doesn't matter that holocaust-revisionists are without exception either stupid or malicious, thanks to that German law they can now appear as fearless voices of the truth. If you want people to know the truth you have to teach them the truth, you can't just legislate them into believing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't be too difficult to have a staffer slip that into a bill.
I think I may have been unlucky with that machine, and probably Dell usually delivers better stuff. However there is a general problem there: when I buy the machine ready-made I don't control the parts. Some parts may be good quality, some will probably be crap.
When I build a machine myself I have control over the parts I pick and I have documentation on everything. The initial costs are probably roughly the same and I have to put in a bit of work, too. However once it gets to upgrading things become a lot easier - I have picked a case which gives me easy access to the components, I have space to put in additional cards, the hard drives are easy to replace etc. I think this is the point at which you can save money, too - you can just replace a few things to keep the machine up-to-date vs buying a new one.
Well, he claimed to be a professor of theology...
Whining about the EU is one thing but opting to stay out or leaving... Whining has no consequences, but once you decide to leave or to stay out you need to face the hard reality that almost everybody inside will be better off than you. Also of course - as long as a country is in the EU, its government can blame all those tough decisions on the EU - "they make us do that". Nothing quite as convenient for a politician as that.
There are countries left which don't want to join? Which ones (apart from Norway and Switzerland)? Turkey is not even on the same continent (ok half of Istanbul is). The way things are going an application by Brazil or Taiwan wouldn't surprise me anymore...
Bullying can include torture. Verbal abuse is just that: verbal abuse, and it's not torture. The next thing is that children are by defintion not adults. If there are seperate laws for children and for adults, then children can never ever be convicted as adults.
On the prison thing - this is the typical knee-jerk "law and order" approach. The US has an absurd number of adults in prison already (higher than any other western country), and still it's crime rate is higher than any other western country. It's easy to advocate "get tough on crime" policies, but experience has shown that these do not work. I don't blame anyone for thinking in the first place that this might work - it's not an unreasonable assumption. However once you've seen it fails you got to think of something else, you can't repeat the same thing and hope the results will change.
Not really, the action itself already excludes the possibility that he is a G-man with a conscience. If he was he'd respect the limits imposed on him by the law which he is supposed to uphold. You cannot serve the law by breaking it.
[...] Global Warming is mentioned
Can you please give a single example for this? Or are you referring to government officials censoring scientific papers which mention global warming?
Almost by definition you wouldn't know whether the hacker wasn't in reality a corrupt G-man.
Sheesh - isn't the whole point of a Wiki that you can do that yourself?
However the linked article mentions additional methods the study uses - it observes times in which downloads are increasing, and finds that CD purchases do not suffer during these periods. Using this they make a stronger claim and state that the net effect of downloading is zero.
Cause individual actions have so far failed to work. If they hadn't we wouldn't even need this discussion.
On top of that, there is the mathematical problem of the prisoner's dilema. If company A and B would increase cost and reduce carbon emissions, all would be better off. However if just company A does it, people will buy from company B and A will be broke. (Vice versa if B does it.) People invented rules and governments to address that fundamental problem.
Probably - humans have adapted their settlements to the areas they live in. Change in their environments means that their agriculture and housing won't be suited anymore.
E.g. lots of people live in coastal areas, if the sea level rises (which is relatively likely) that means they'll lose their houses and land. On the other hand inland areas which are dry could become even drier - people there might not be able to grow food anymore.
Of course, earth may well stabilize itself in a few thousand years, and humans as a species might survice that, too. (Why not - we survived the ice age, after all.) However the economic and humanitarian costs of such an adjustment would be gigantic. It would seem to make sense to come up with strategies to avoid this scenario in the first place. There is really no need to put that much CO2 into the atmosphere.
There is a danger in putting too tight limits on people after they have served their time. If you prohibit them from doing anything at all, eventually they'll have no choice but to break the law. There is already a vast range of jobs which require people to use computers, banning released convicts from owning computers prevents them from acquiring the skills to work in these jobs. (Likewise it would make no sense to prohibit them from owning computers, but to allow them to work on other people's computers - they might use those for nefarious purposes too, so the restriction would be pointless.)
This is certainly not true, since your argument contradicts itself immediately. If you say that every effect demands a cause, then you've already eliminated the possibility of a first cause. On the other hand if you do allow a first cause, then any first cause is permissible. There is no particular reason to assume that it was an intelligent being.
Humans can create live, usually a process called sex is involved. God can't create anything, due to his lack of existence. Governments are structures created by humans, getting those right or wrong has a lot to do with the rights people actually have. Also - no matter what the writers of the declaration of independence thought - there is no biblical basis for the concept of rights. So even if you do believe in a christian god - rights don't come from god. Even if you do believe in god, there is no biblical justification for thinking humans can't reproduce without his intervention.
I can see you are frustrated about John Howard, but lots of Americans are frustrated about Bush, too. The GP's point that Australian society was inherently better at avoiding useless wars does not hold - both have failed in the case of Iraq.
There is really nothing in e.g. the bible which gives rights to anyone. The European convention on human rights (as a random example) has given rights to people who didn't have them before, various constitutions have done the same. "The Creator"? Stop giving credit to your imaginary friend for things which other people accomplished.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/09/18 33244
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/03/14/landslide -porn060314.html
A terminal which is sophisticated enough to allow online-purchases would allow to view illegal websites in the same manner, so I fail to see what your solution actually accomplishes. Admittedly I know of no case of law enforcement monitoring people who use terminals, considering there are almost no people who use these in a home setting that seems irrelevant.
Nobody has been arrested for playing on a console, but there are many people who play games on PCs. Sure theoretically they could buy some special printer, use some special graphics display, buy a console and so on. You have a snowballs chance in hell in actually getting anyone to go to that trouble.
Does it really take a PC to send a photograph to someone? No.
Yes.
Can you send a picture to someone over the Internet if you have a graphic display terminal instead of a PC? Yes.
No.
I know, sure you can do anything with a graphics terminal. As long as that terminal has a USB port, allows you to upload and download things and store them somewhere (e.g. to your mp3 player). As long as that terminal is in fact indistinguishable from a PC. Apart from having no local drive on which the user could store his photographs, his emails and his mp3s.
After all this, I'm really unclear now what you are trying to do? Which specific problem would actually be solved by your proposal, and how would you convince people to go for your solution?
As for the photo stuff - people want to send their photographs to other users.
Oh and online games, people use computers for gaming.
Maybe once they had distributed the files sufficiently they'd alert the authorities and let them start work on the innocent. Once a few high-profile cases collapse (maybe you'd pick a 16 year-old child to increase media attention) you'd have a plausible defence - evil hackers put it there. Very wild speculation, I admit.
I disagree. The majority of users have little grasps on the working of an OS, but there are many non-streaming things they want to do with their PC, like chatting, online-banking or editing images taking with the digital camera. They want to build web pages and they want to send email. If that wasn't true how would you explain myspace, all these email viruses and chain mails?
Consider the effect this law has had - it's nothing but a recruiting tool for revisionists. If you need a law to prevent someone from disagreeing with you, it smells fishy, it seems like you are not telling the truth. It doesn't matter that holocaust-revisionists are without exception either stupid or malicious, thanks to that German law they can now appear as fearless voices of the truth. If you want people to know the truth you have to teach them the truth, you can't just legislate them into believing it.
Because you let them.