But taxation's like that. A couple of examples: The US had different import duties on dolls than from toys. There was a court battle over whether X men figures counted as oys or Dolls. Many countries tax different types of alcohol differently. SUVs are taxed differently from sports cars even though that's what a lot of them are. There is absolutely no consistency to taxation at all.
But there were only a certain number of companies big enough to use a mainframe, and most of these would have been in the US an Europe until very recently. Other companies would have outsourced anything that needed a computer. I'd say world computing power definitely was higher than a 4GHz Pentium 4 by the time the home computer market had started, but the mainframes do mess things up
But this is where the problem is. With a little research, it's quite possible to get a good estimate for the speed of, say a PDP-8, but unless you know of a good resource for sales of computers between 1950 and 1980, it's difficult to estimate how many machines there were.
Well, lets start with Moores law, which tells us that computers double in speed every 18 months or so. This means in 30 years, they go up in speed by a factor of a million. Of course, a business compuiter in 1976 would be a lot more powerful than a home computer, but I'd imagine there weren't a lot of them. There were a number of home computer kits as well, but once again, I can't imagine that there would be a huge number of people wanting to build kits, and certainly not as many as a million, so you probably have a lot more power than they had in 1976.
Moving on to 1979, The Apple ][ was actually becoming succesful. Desktop computers such as the Apple II probably accounted for most processing power by this time, with mainframes becoming a relatively insignificant part of the equation. Now we're only looking at about a 250 000 times increase in speed since then. Were there more than 250 000 personal computers by 1979? Possibly. They sold a few million Apple II's in its lifetime. So I'd say you're probably looking at somewhere around 1978 give or take a year. After the first home computers were released, there was a sudden spike in total world computing power.
Just abut all of this is totally specualtive and any refinement would be appreciated.
Yes and no. And a bit more yes and no. It all depends on the company. There certainly is a lot of cross licencing in the microprocessor industry, and I assume it was the same in other parts of the electronics industry. There's remarkably little hoarding of technology because really the whole industry works better with cooperation. Other fields there's a less friendly atmosphere, with a lot of small players, many of them go fo landgrabs.
But the patenting of obvious inventions is hardly a recent idea. Edison invented the lightbulb at about the same time as a number of others. Edison patented some fairly obvious aspects, and the court battles over the validity if the patents went on for quite some time.
So you've been born into a more priviledged lifestyle and as a result, you consider yourself superior to someone who is willing to make the huge step of learning a language and moving to a different country to improve their life.
The way in which something is deffective is irrelevant - if I don't like a product, I don't have to buy it.
True. However, usually they'd like to know why you're not buying a product. If you dislike McDonalds because they only serve fatty food, then they might consider some healthier options. But that will only happen if they know about it.
Using your logic, someone is a thief for abandoning their car in the middle of the street just because they are blocking others from going down the road.
No they aren't. That's using your extrapolation of my logic. So, using your logic they are. Using mine, they aren't. They have every right to avail themselves of the street. It's antisocial to cause an obstruction, but they aren't taking the road. They could steal a parking space for a certain amount of time, its true.
from using it to describe duplication of files to using it as you have done to describe hogging resources.
Hogging resources is pretty much what theft is. But it's hogging of fairly specific resources.
If 1000 people decided to use the network connectyion, then legitimate owners wouldn't have access to it. He is availing himself of the servide to the detriment of legitimate users. Sounds like theft to me.
But if you leave a shop door open, it's legal for people to wander in and browse. It's all about social convention. People do expect you wander into their shops, they don't expect you to wander into their home, and the rules on wirless networks are a little less certain.
I agree with you, but I think that network neutrality is the wrong solution. Especially because it's a solution to a problem that only exists hypothetically.
What would work better is better competition. In England, there is a large choice of ADSL ISPs. They allow easy transfer to another ISP with no downtime, and most offer a minimum contract of 3 months. Legislation forcing this sort of thing or encouraging competition would help a lot, and would prevent this from becoming a problem, wihtout risking outlawing possible benefits of a non-neutral network.
I think Fifth Element was a good choice. I'd imagine there's a decent overlap between the people who like cult movies, and the early adopters. But a key point with Fifth Element is simply that it has some scenes that are absolutely fantastic. All those cityscapes shots almost justify it alone.
There would be a gap in the market for another cheaper download service. Since the movies aren't going to be tied to a player, (there is the video iPod, but my guess is most people would prefer to watch movies at home), there is going to be less of a tendency towards a monopoly. The MPAA may well be able to use the competition as leverage.
Although, given this, I'm not sure why they think they need iTunes.
Perhaps it will actually stop the freekin' weird US scheduling.
Seriously - Why do the studios and advertisers rate the ratings so highly? The system is inherently gamable, so the very act of gathering statistics affects the schedules. This is why they have "sweeps". Is there somethign magical about that time? Nope. It's just when the people who are doing the counting decide they're going to look. If it wasn't for this, there woukld eb a much more regular spread of quality programming throughout the year, rather than the bursts of new episodes followded by weeks of repeats.
Nom, but if you sell somone a gun in order for them to commit a murder, tthen you'r an accomplice. And if you sell someone a gun in order for them to sell it to someone to commit murder, then you're an accomplice, and so is the intermediary, and so on. And if the intermediary didn't know that the recipient was going to commit a murder, but you did, then he's not an accomplice.
Indeed. My devious system is flawed, and the headcrabs would work better. However, I feel we have digressed from my point, which is that generally people aren't prosecuted for accidental breaches of the law on a technicality, unless the authorities have some other grevience with them.
I think this is all I have to say on the matter, which is a shame. You have a most entertaining way of making me seem like an idiot.
I'm not talking about the studio bosses and beancounters. I'm talking about the actual programmers and designers. Everyone I've talked to wants to develop for it. It's true, research is expensive, but it's also interesting work. Graphics and physics were interesting a few years ago, but now there's a lot of work for small incremental improvements. It's just not as cool anymore. Nintendo are actively ewncouraging people to try something different. Not that I don't look forward to the promise of the PS3. The games should look fantastic. Hope the developers find a use for all the horsepower.
And, I see, amazing technology that is able to crawl inside a person's head and determine intent...
Indeed. I have this cunning process. What happens is we take a representative sample of the population, and a trained adjudicator. Then one party delivers evidence to show that the person deliberately and wilfully performed certain actions. Then the other party presents evidence to show that either the person either did not perform the actions, did not do so deliberately and wilfully, or such actions were not in fact against the law. Then the sample of the population discussses the evidence and comes to a conclusion about whether they think the person broke the law.
This is why murder and manslaughter are different crimes. The actual result is the same, the primary difference is one is intentional and the other is accidental.
Okay - maybe not, but it's getting a lot of interest from the developers. Developers like a low power machine with a new controller. The can spend all their time fooling with funky gameplay mechanics. The extra power od the PS3 has potential, but getting the most out of that is a lot of work programming, optimising and debugging, whereas new gameplay mechanics are a lot more fun to work with.
Do you guys here have any idea about how the law works at all?
It's all about intent. Does Google intend to encourage people to gamble online? Is that the purpose of the site? It seems to me that the purpose of Google is simply to find information about whatever the person is looking for. Yes, if they're looking for online gampblinbg, then it will do that, but that's a side effect of a primarily legitimate service.
Now, this guy is probably protected by that constitution thingy you guys have got, so he should be okay, but his site is completely different from Google. It's sole purpose is to discuss internet gambling. By all accounts, it exists to promote internet gambling. As such, it is completely different from Google.
Slashdot Mirror
But taxation's like that. A couple of examples: The US had different import duties on dolls than from toys. There was a court battle over whether X men figures counted as oys or Dolls. Many countries tax different types of alcohol differently. SUVs are taxed differently from sports cars even though that's what a lot of them are. There is absolutely no consistency to taxation at all.
But there were only a certain number of companies big enough to use a mainframe, and most of these would have been in the US an Europe until very recently. Other companies would have outsourced anything that needed a computer. I'd say world computing power definitely was higher than a 4GHz Pentium 4 by the time the home computer market had started, but the mainframes do mess things up
But this is where the problem is. With a little research, it's quite possible to get a good estimate for the speed of, say a PDP-8, but unless you know of a good resource for sales of computers between 1950 and 1980, it's difficult to estimate how many machines there were.
Well, lets start with Moores law, which tells us that computers double in speed every 18 months or so. This means in 30 years, they go up in speed by a factor of a million. Of course, a business compuiter in 1976 would be a lot more powerful than a home computer, but I'd imagine there weren't a lot of them. There were a number of home computer kits as well, but once again, I can't imagine that there would be a huge number of people wanting to build kits, and certainly not as many as a million, so you probably have a lot more power than they had in 1976.
Moving on to 1979, The Apple ][ was actually becoming succesful. Desktop computers such as the Apple II probably accounted for most processing power by this time, with mainframes becoming a relatively insignificant part of the equation. Now we're only looking at about a 250 000 times increase in speed since then. Were there more than 250 000 personal computers by 1979? Possibly. They sold a few million Apple II's in its lifetime. So I'd say you're probably looking at somewhere around 1978 give or take a year. After the first home computers were released, there was a sudden spike in total world computing power.
Just abut all of this is totally specualtive and any refinement would be appreciated.
Yes and no. And a bit more yes and no. It all depends on the company. There certainly is a lot of cross licencing in the microprocessor industry, and I assume it was the same in other parts of the electronics industry. There's remarkably little hoarding of technology because really the whole industry works better with cooperation. Other fields there's a less friendly atmosphere, with a lot of small players, many of them go fo landgrabs.
But the patenting of obvious inventions is hardly a recent idea. Edison invented the lightbulb at about the same time as a number of others. Edison patented some fairly obvious aspects, and the court battles over the validity if the patents went on for quite some time.
They are.
Well, okay, not in the HTML, but the scans are high enough resolution to read. Shame there's no search capability.
So you've been born into a more priviledged lifestyle and as a result, you consider yourself superior to someone who is willing to make the huge step of learning a language and moving to a different country to improve their life.
The way in which something is deffective is irrelevant - if I don't like a product, I don't have to buy it.
True. However, usually they'd like to know why you're not buying a product. If you dislike McDonalds because they only serve fatty food, then they might consider some healthier options. But that will only happen if they know about it.
well, actually - six null results, and what would you suggest as a control?
You are not allowed to your phone at a petrol station because it may spark and risk a fire.
Braniac put this to the test. They filled a caravan with petrol, put in half a dozen phones and called them all at the same time. No bang.
Then they got someone in a shell suit charged up with static to touch a pair of wires connected to the caravan. then it went bang.
Using your logic, someone is a thief for abandoning their car in the middle of the street just because they are blocking others from going down the road.
No they aren't. That's using your extrapolation of my logic. So, using your logic they are. Using mine, they aren't. They have every right to avail themselves of the street. It's antisocial to cause an obstruction, but they aren't taking the road. They could steal a parking space for a certain amount of time, its true.
from using it to describe duplication of files to using it as you have done to describe hogging resources.
Hogging resources is pretty much what theft is. But it's hogging of fairly specific resources.
If 1000 people decided to use the network connectyion, then legitimate owners wouldn't have access to it. He is availing himself of the servide to the detriment of legitimate users. Sounds like theft to me.
But if you leave a shop door open, it's legal for people to wander in and browse. It's all about social convention. People do expect you wander into their shops, they don't expect you to wander into their home, and the rules on wirless networks are a little less certain.
Suddenly is seem like Captain Cyborg might have a point.
I agree with you, but I think that network neutrality is the wrong solution. Especially because it's a solution to a problem that only exists hypothetically.
What would work better is better competition. In England, there is a large choice of ADSL ISPs. They allow easy transfer to another ISP with no downtime, and most offer a minimum contract of 3 months. Legislation forcing this sort of thing or encouraging competition would help a lot, and would prevent this from becoming a problem, wihtout risking outlawing possible benefits of a non-neutral network.
I think Fifth Element was a good choice. I'd imagine there's a decent overlap between the people who like cult movies, and the early adopters. But a key point with Fifth Element is simply that it has some scenes that are absolutely fantastic. All those cityscapes shots almost justify it alone.
There would be a gap in the market for another cheaper download service. Since the movies aren't going to be tied to a player, (there is the video iPod, but my guess is most people would prefer to watch movies at home), there is going to be less of a tendency towards a monopoly. The MPAA may well be able to use the competition as leverage.
Although, given this, I'm not sure why they think they need iTunes.
Perhaps it will actually stop the freekin' weird US scheduling.
Seriously - Why do the studios and advertisers rate the ratings so highly? The system is inherently gamable, so the very act of gathering statistics affects the schedules. This is why they have "sweeps". Is there somethign magical about that time? Nope. It's just when the people who are doing the counting decide they're going to look. If it wasn't for this, there woukld eb a much more regular spread of quality programming throughout the year, rather than the bursts of new episodes followded by weeks of repeats.
Nom, but if you sell somone a gun in order for them to commit a murder, tthen you'r an accomplice. And if you sell someone a gun in order for them to sell it to someone to commit murder, then you're an accomplice, and so is the intermediary, and so on. And if the intermediary didn't know that the recipient was going to commit a murder, but you did, then he's not an accomplice.
Indeed. My devious system is flawed, and the headcrabs would work better. However, I feel we have digressed from my point, which is that generally people aren't prosecuted for accidental breaches of the law on a technicality, unless the authorities have some other grevience with them.
I think this is all I have to say on the matter, which is a shame. You have a most entertaining way of making me seem like an idiot.
No, because it's all about intent. The sole purpose of the action is to facilitate online gambling.
I'm not talking about the studio bosses and beancounters. I'm talking about the actual programmers and designers. Everyone I've talked to wants to develop for it. It's true, research is expensive, but it's also interesting work. Graphics and physics were interesting a few years ago, but now there's a lot of work for small incremental improvements. It's just not as cool anymore. Nintendo are actively ewncouraging people to try something different. Not that I don't look forward to the promise of the PS3. The games should look fantastic. Hope the developers find a use for all the horsepower.
And, I see, amazing technology that is able to crawl inside a person's head and determine intent...
Indeed. I have this cunning process. What happens is we take a representative sample of the population, and a trained adjudicator. Then one party delivers evidence to show that the person deliberately and wilfully performed certain actions. Then the other party presents evidence to show that either the person either did not perform the actions, did not do so deliberately and wilfully, or such actions were not in fact against the law. Then the sample of the population discussses the evidence and comes to a conclusion about whether they think the person broke the law.
This is why murder and manslaughter are different crimes. The actual result is the same, the primary difference is one is intentional and the other is accidental.
They most probably could... Especially so if they were targetted directly at WA residents.
Woahh dude! The Wii will be so much better!
Okay - maybe not, but it's getting a lot of interest from the developers. Developers like a low power machine with a new controller. The can spend all their time fooling with funky gameplay mechanics. The extra power od the PS3 has potential, but getting the most out of that is a lot of work programming, optimising and debugging, whereas new gameplay mechanics are a lot more fun to work with.
Do you guys here have any idea about how the law works at all?
It's all about intent. Does Google intend to encourage people to gamble online? Is that the purpose of the site? It seems to me that the purpose of Google is simply to find information about whatever the person is looking for. Yes, if they're looking for online gampblinbg, then it will do that, but that's a side effect of a primarily legitimate service.
Now, this guy is probably protected by that constitution thingy you guys have got, so he should be okay, but his site is completely different from Google. It's sole purpose is to discuss internet gambling. By all accounts, it exists to promote internet gambling. As such, it is completely different from Google.