Taxes like the income tax ensure those working for a living will have a difficult time getting ahead.
US federal income taxes are not a burden to the poor because the poor aren't paying much, if anything, in federal income taxes. Even the middle class isn't paying much in income taxes, the tax rates are pretty low that I've seen in the tax rate charts. Personal misuse of money is far more to blame than income taxes in "keeping people down".
I see what you mean, but in a different way, VAT is a hidden tax too, depending on how you look at it. With VAT, you might not know how much of the price you are paying in tax. A sales tax is almost always clearly printed on the receipt so you can see how much you tax are paying. Only if you're from out of town/state you might not be aware of the tax rate. To that kind of person, and maybe a resident doofus that never reads his/her receipts might it be a hidden tax.
Computers can be set to start up at a predetermined time. So if you arrive at 8am, set it to turn on at 7:50am and that time isn't wasted, and you don't have a computer that's constantly on overnight and on the weekends.
I don't understand your 2000 hours per employee figure, because that's the full working time of an employee assuming 40 hours a week * 50 weeks, not including over time. Basically, unless it's so efficient that we can axe all our employees, it's not worth implementing a given cost saving measure? Or are you just saying fire some employees?
Life is tough for a lot of people, in good times or bad. I really don't have solutions to the problems on the developer side. But I do know you really need to have a strong brand and a strong game to charge a premium. I don't know if you can sell a lot of a more expensive product on a sob story. A poster mentioned successes over Steam where half the price sometimes sells 10x the copies. Make a solid game, find legitimate viral ways to promote the product, price it fairly for the market and I think you'll find success more often than otherwise possible.
I think there was a fundamental problem with the marketing of broadband which either poorly communicated the intent behind the term "unlimited", intentionally misleading, or they didn't expect that people would actually try to use the service as if it was unlimited. The companies claim that "unlimited" meant "always on", as in, you don't have to dial in or disconnect. I can understand that, but given how it was marketed, I think it's more like the marketing was intentionally misleading.
Frankly, I had no problem with a 250GB cap, but most of the lower caps was putting the squeeze on heavy users of legitimate media.
I also don't trust these companies either, my expectation is that they won't offer an easy way to track their use, won't tell the users if they're about to go over, and tell people "tough nuts" if they go over and charge a high rate per kB.
Another problem is the monopoly systems here, for each kind of connection, you're basically only allowed one provider to serve that kind of connection for the given area. Despite the fact that public right of ways are used to string these wires, I don't see why they shouldn't be required to lease those lines out to other ISPs. Many areas might only be served by cable, others, only by DSL, if you're really lucky, you might have a choice of cable & DSL, but only one provider each. If you're really lucky, you might have a fiber internet option. Then there's the lesser options such as wireless/cellular, satellite and modem. So it's not something that I would call a competitive arrangement.
Sounds like a defect in the wear leveling system. Not that I really understand how wear leveling is done in practice. I understand the idea of trying to spread the writes over the whole device, I just don't know how they actually keep track of that block mapping.
I think we're doing all that right now (this one, we as a species, not just the US or the West), but it's a side effect rather than the goal. It is informally called "global dimming", where particulate pollution is reflecting sunlight. There was a NOVA episode on this where they managed to find data to help them track the amount of sunlight hitting the surface over the past hundred years or so, among other lines of evidence.
Given that TLDs are going to cost $200k for the first year, I don't think your scenarios are really a problem.
Still, almost nobody searches by TLD. It doesn't matter what the domain name is, as long as the search engines know where it is. Despite the silly.philly example, search engines don't search by TLD or any level of domain unless you specifically restrict your search.
I'd rate flash more evil than you let on, just because it's just too inefficient. I wouldn't want a page with a flash element be idle for long on battery power, as Flash seems to want 5% of processing power whenever it's running.
North Korea wouldn't be what it is now if China wasn't supporting them.
Didn't the US try a coup on Iran? How long did that last? The problem is that if it's not backed by the people, it's only going to cause problems. The US has aided coups many times and it seems people have forgotten about them, which makes the US more susceptible to continue doing it.
I seriously question your "most effective peace policy". If you ever get a chance to track it down, try watching Niall Ferguson's "The War Of The World" TV series (also in book form too) which covers what happened since WWII. Niall referred to the cold war as the "War of the Third World" because the US and USSR fought many proxy wars. The more well known ones were in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan (1980's). There were smaller flare-ups too. The US propped up murderous right wing dictatorships to prevent having murderous marxist dictatorships aligned with the USSR.
The US and Soviet Union had very large standing armies despite the huge nuclear arsenals. Not only that, there have been many mass killings and genocides since the dawn of the nuclear age. I don't think the presense of nuclear weapons in the mix has really slowed that down.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Maybe in the very short term, and assuming you don't want those assets that you are blowing into smithereens, or you don't mind not being able to get to the oil resources because they are in or near a "hot" zone.
I think you're also forgetting that the fallout would blow over US allies, and those US allies aren't going to like that. It's hard to maintain a hegemony if your hedge bolts.
Also, those people that you nuke, most often have relatives outside of the nuked zone, and they're going to be upset. The problem with the war on terror is that the1 "collateral damage" euphemism is covering up the fact that some of the families that are accidentally killed are going to be pushed to extremism. So for every bad guy you kill with an innocent bystander killed, you add another family that gets pushed into extremism, creating at least one more "bad guy". This is the danger of the "long war", it becomes never ending because you create your own endless cycle of enemies.
The article mention of First International Computer was a tipoff that I really wasn't going to miss it - I've had enough problems with an FIC product and had heard enough independent confirmation to steer clear.
The article mention of First International Computer was a tipoff that I really wasn't going to miss it - I've heard about enough problems with an FIC product and had heard enough independent confirmation to steer clear.
If someone says that I can't complain about Gmail because it's in beta, I might decide to laugh. Or cry for the person that would actually dare suggest something so absurd as that. A "beta" that's been five years and running is kind of like a five year engagement, a sad moniker for a pitiful situation.
I use VLC on a Mac, though only sparingly, avoiding it whenever possible. For one, it's not that reliable, occasionally crashing on DVD playback and throwing errors whenever it pleases.
VLC's DVD deinterlacing isn't all that great, and I think the deinterlacing is applied after subtitles have been applied to the image. I don't think it does a very good job of applying subtitles to the image in the first place, I get clipped edges that I just don't see on other players.
They got media coverage on how silly they are too. If Google Street View really was a tool for prospective thieves, then the problem would have arisen well before now in all the other cities they've photographed.
Is legislation prohibiting state funds from being used on something really any different than legislation requiring state funds to be used to buy a specific product? I'm pretty sure the latter is a common occurrence. If it is, then I don't see why the former would be a major problem.
Which is too bad. All these idiots who think that they are somehow entitled to something for nothing will end up driving the content providers out of business. Than what will the internet have won?
It's a tad bit more complicated here. In this case, the Hulu users would still be getting something in exchange for watching ads. It's not nothing, though the ad revenue through Hulu would be a lot less than ad revenue on a regular channel. I would not be surprised if it was a 10:1 or 20:1 ratio as to revenue per viewer on broadcast vs. Hulu. That's a very steep cliff to jump, not anything like a smooth transition from "old" media to "new" media.
While the difference between TV and video on the internet is beginning to blur, it's still pretty well defined from the user's perspective, how you interact with it is different on a computer, and I think Hulu on XBMC and AppleTV is still a niche audience at best for the moment. Even if the content providers are getting money through Hulu, they can't afford to lose audience members from the channel to Hulu any faster than they have to.
The publisher who makes the effort to put material on the most widely read medium always prevails. Looks like google is doing what the dead tree publishers refuse to do.
Assuming ebooks are the most widely read medium. I don't think that's anywhere nearly the case yet. I think a billion books are published a year, and I haven't heard about a million of the readers being made in the last decade. Right now, it's still in the novelty stage, not mass adoption stage.
Books shouldn't need a heavy duty processor, that would require heavy batteries and hobble the battery life. And it's usually not necessary, at the moment, the limiting factor is usually the page refresh.
[quote]Anything else is just bunkum from companies that have NOT checked their legal requirements and/or liabilities.[/quote]
The companies probably don't want to tell you your legal rights any more than they have to. The less you know, the more it helps them.
[quote]companies can spout a lot of rubbish at you, but breaching (or even modifying) a legal contract with you on the basis of a third-party's hear-say isn't something that is going to stand up in a court of law. However, don't be surprised if, in the following years, your ISP's terms & conditions include clauses that allow them to use the RIAA or similar as someone with the say-so to terminate your contract, or similar. And once you sign that (or agree to those changes, even if that's just by failing to cancel after you were notified of them), THEN you have a lot bigger problems.[/quote]
Isn't that the very concern though? If changing the contracts is this easy, then all the fuss about breach of contract is very easily negated in several month's time. I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T already has some convenient out clauses in their contracts already.
Maybe they don't want to deliberately dump profitable customers any more than they have to, even if they may be still be driving them away by having a frustrating customer service bureaucracy.
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Allowing only two companies to handle that info is quite a boondoggle.
Taxes like the income tax ensure those working for a living will have a difficult time getting ahead.
US federal income taxes are not a burden to the poor because the poor aren't paying much, if anything, in federal income taxes. Even the middle class isn't paying much in income taxes, the tax rates are pretty low that I've seen in the tax rate charts. Personal misuse of money is far more to blame than income taxes in "keeping people down".
I see what you mean, but in a different way, VAT is a hidden tax too, depending on how you look at it. With VAT, you might not know how much of the price you are paying in tax. A sales tax is almost always clearly printed on the receipt so you can see how much you tax are paying. Only if you're from out of town/state you might not be aware of the tax rate. To that kind of person, and maybe a resident doofus that never reads his/her receipts might it be a hidden tax.
Ten provinces is a lot easier to deal with than 50 states + numerous cities and counties that have a sales tax.
Computers can be set to start up at a predetermined time. So if you arrive at 8am, set it to turn on at 7:50am and that time isn't wasted, and you don't have a computer that's constantly on overnight and on the weekends.
I don't understand your 2000 hours per employee figure, because that's the full working time of an employee assuming 40 hours a week * 50 weeks, not including over time. Basically, unless it's so efficient that we can axe all our employees, it's not worth implementing a given cost saving measure? Or are you just saying fire some employees?
Life is tough for a lot of people, in good times or bad. I really don't have solutions to the problems on the developer side. But I do know you really need to have a strong brand and a strong game to charge a premium. I don't know if you can sell a lot of a more expensive product on a sob story. A poster mentioned successes over Steam where half the price sometimes sells 10x the copies. Make a solid game, find legitimate viral ways to promote the product, price it fairly for the market and I think you'll find success more often than otherwise possible.
I think there was a fundamental problem with the marketing of broadband which either poorly communicated the intent behind the term "unlimited", intentionally misleading, or they didn't expect that people would actually try to use the service as if it was unlimited. The companies claim that "unlimited" meant "always on", as in, you don't have to dial in or disconnect. I can understand that, but given how it was marketed, I think it's more like the marketing was intentionally misleading.
Frankly, I had no problem with a 250GB cap, but most of the lower caps was putting the squeeze on heavy users of legitimate media.
I also don't trust these companies either, my expectation is that they won't offer an easy way to track their use, won't tell the users if they're about to go over, and tell people "tough nuts" if they go over and charge a high rate per kB.
Another problem is the monopoly systems here, for each kind of connection, you're basically only allowed one provider to serve that kind of connection for the given area. Despite the fact that public right of ways are used to string these wires, I don't see why they shouldn't be required to lease those lines out to other ISPs. Many areas might only be served by cable, others, only by DSL, if you're really lucky, you might have a choice of cable & DSL, but only one provider each. If you're really lucky, you might have a fiber internet option. Then there's the lesser options such as wireless/cellular, satellite and modem. So it's not something that I would call a competitive arrangement.
Sounds like a defect in the wear leveling system. Not that I really understand how wear leveling is done in practice. I understand the idea of trying to spread the writes over the whole device, I just don't know how they actually keep track of that block mapping.
I think we're doing all that right now (this one, we as a species, not just the US or the West), but it's a side effect rather than the goal. It is informally called "global dimming", where particulate pollution is reflecting sunlight. There was a NOVA episode on this where they managed to find data to help them track the amount of sunlight hitting the surface over the past hundred years or so, among other lines of evidence.
Given that TLDs are going to cost $200k for the first year, I don't think your scenarios are really a problem.
Still, almost nobody searches by TLD. It doesn't matter what the domain name is, as long as the search engines know where it is. Despite the silly .philly example, search engines don't search by TLD or any level of domain unless you specifically restrict your search.
I'd rate flash more evil than you let on, just because it's just too inefficient. I wouldn't want a page with a flash element be idle for long on battery power, as Flash seems to want 5% of processing power whenever it's running.
North Korea wouldn't be what it is now if China wasn't supporting them.
Didn't the US try a coup on Iran? How long did that last? The problem is that if it's not backed by the people, it's only going to cause problems. The US has aided coups many times and it seems people have forgotten about them, which makes the US more susceptible to continue doing it.
I seriously question your "most effective peace policy". If you ever get a chance to track it down, try watching Niall Ferguson's "The War Of The World" TV series (also in book form too) which covers what happened since WWII. Niall referred to the cold war as the "War of the Third World" because the US and USSR fought many proxy wars. The more well known ones were in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan (1980's). There were smaller flare-ups too. The US propped up murderous right wing dictatorships to prevent having murderous marxist dictatorships aligned with the USSR.
The US and Soviet Union had very large standing armies despite the huge nuclear arsenals. Not only that, there have been many mass killings and genocides since the dawn of the nuclear age. I don't think the presense of nuclear weapons in the mix has really slowed that down.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Maybe in the very short term, and assuming you don't want those assets that you are blowing into smithereens, or you don't mind not being able to get to the oil resources because they are in or near a "hot" zone.
I think you're also forgetting that the fallout would blow over US allies, and those US allies aren't going to like that. It's hard to maintain a hegemony if your hedge bolts.
Also, those people that you nuke, most often have relatives outside of the nuked zone, and they're going to be upset. The problem with the war on terror is that the1 "collateral damage" euphemism is covering up the fact that some of the families that are accidentally killed are going to be pushed to extremism. So for every bad guy you kill with an innocent bystander killed, you add another family that gets pushed into extremism, creating at least one more "bad guy". This is the danger of the "long war", it becomes never ending because you create your own endless cycle of enemies.
I meant to say:
The article mention of First International Computer was a tipoff that I really wasn't going to miss it - I've had enough problems with an FIC product and had heard enough independent confirmation to steer clear.
My mistake.
The article mention of First International Computer was a tipoff that I really wasn't going to miss it - I've heard about enough problems with an FIC product and had heard enough independent confirmation to steer clear.
If someone says that I can't complain about Gmail because it's in beta, I might decide to laugh. Or cry for the person that would actually dare suggest something so absurd as that. A "beta" that's been five years and running is kind of like a five year engagement, a sad moniker for a pitiful situation.
I use VLC on a Mac, though only sparingly, avoiding it whenever possible. For one, it's not that reliable, occasionally crashing on DVD playback and throwing errors whenever it pleases.
VLC's DVD deinterlacing isn't all that great, and I think the deinterlacing is applied after subtitles have been applied to the image. I don't think it does a very good job of applying subtitles to the image in the first place, I get clipped edges that I just don't see on other players.
They got media coverage on how silly they are too. If Google Street View really was a tool for prospective thieves, then the problem would have arisen well before now in all the other cities they've photographed.
Is legislation prohibiting state funds from being used on something really any different than legislation requiring state funds to be used to buy a specific product? I'm pretty sure the latter is a common occurrence. If it is, then I don't see why the former would be a major problem.
Which is too bad. All these idiots who think that they are somehow entitled to something for nothing will end up driving the content providers out of business. Than what will the internet have won?
It's a tad bit more complicated here. In this case, the Hulu users would still be getting something in exchange for watching ads. It's not nothing, though the ad revenue through Hulu would be a lot less than ad revenue on a regular channel. I would not be surprised if it was a 10:1 or 20:1 ratio as to revenue per viewer on broadcast vs. Hulu. That's a very steep cliff to jump, not anything like a smooth transition from "old" media to "new" media.
While the difference between TV and video on the internet is beginning to blur, it's still pretty well defined from the user's perspective, how you interact with it is different on a computer, and I think Hulu on XBMC and AppleTV is still a niche audience at best for the moment. Even if the content providers are getting money through Hulu, they can't afford to lose audience members from the channel to Hulu any faster than they have to.
The publisher who makes the effort to put material on the most widely read medium always prevails. Looks like google is doing what the dead tree publishers refuse to do.
Assuming ebooks are the most widely read medium. I don't think that's anywhere nearly the case yet. I think a billion books are published a year, and I haven't heard about a million of the readers being made in the last decade. Right now, it's still in the novelty stage, not mass adoption stage.
Books shouldn't need a heavy duty processor, that would require heavy batteries and hobble the battery life. And it's usually not necessary, at the moment, the limiting factor is usually the page refresh.
[quote]Anything else is just bunkum from companies that have NOT checked their legal requirements and/or liabilities.[/quote]
The companies probably don't want to tell you your legal rights any more than they have to. The less you know, the more it helps them.
[quote]companies can spout a lot of rubbish at you, but breaching (or even modifying) a legal contract with you on the basis of a third-party's hear-say isn't something that is going to stand up in a court of law. However, don't be surprised if, in the following years, your ISP's terms & conditions include clauses that allow them to use the RIAA or similar as someone with the say-so to terminate your contract, or similar. And once you sign that (or agree to those changes, even if that's just by failing to cancel after you were notified of them), THEN you have a lot bigger problems.[/quote]
Isn't that the very concern though? If changing the contracts is this easy, then all the fuss about breach of contract is very easily negated in several month's time. I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T already has some convenient out clauses in their contracts already.
Maybe they don't want to deliberately dump profitable customers any more than they have to, even if they may be still be driving them away by having a frustrating customer service bureaucracy.