There's probably all kinds of little things like this that a determined group of 50 guys with legal firearms could do. The kinds of guns people talk about banning are probably less scary then real old-timey blackpowder guns, because making blackpowder is legal, and that shit could totally take out a bridge. So our 50 guys could ruin your commute, probably destroy the local sewer lines, take out a police station or three, etc. Hell I'd be stunned if it took five guys with 22s to storm a nuclear plant. You'd probably need more if you didn't have inside information on the plant's security, but not that much more.
The reason this shit doesn't happen is that it's really hard to get 50 guys to agree on a single operation without one of them ratting everyone out to the cops. For all that we bitch about our government, and the amount of times said government deserves to be bitched at, things have not gotten so bad that people think starting a Civil War is a good idea. Even in subcultures where you can get people to agree to fight the Power, generally by the time you've picked up two dozen guys you've picked up some loser who will be caught. Remember that the FBI in Minnesota had Zacarias Moussaoui in custody on immigration charges, and they had a pretty good idea that he was planning on crashing a plane into something, but they weren't able to convince anyone in DC to take them seriously.
I'm not the best person to ask about that, because there's extra regulations involved. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) lots of patient information is protected from disclosure. Disclosing it wrongly can get medical professionals in deep trouble (including putting their licenses in jeopardy), but they are supposed to turn info over "when legally required." More important then the legal niceties, almost no healthcare professional will turn over a patient record without first being informed by his lawyer that, yes, under HIPAA he is supposed to turn over said record. In writing. Two copies. Of actual writing, with an actual signature (ie: not a print-out). One for his home files which he knows nobody will mess with, and one for work, where he may have to use it.
Keep in mind there's supposed to be a cost/benefit analysis to all governmental data collection. If the benefits outweigh the costs the search is reasonable, and thus allowed. The benefit to the government (and thus the society that created the government) of knowing the numbers every drug dealer is dialing is very high. It helps cops do their jobs and lock up very destructive people, so it's easy to calculate in dollar terms. The cost in privacy rights is impossible to calculate in dollar terms, and therefore $0.00 in most court-rooms. With medical data the cost/benefit is much different. There is no benefit to law enforcement knowing every person on anti-depressants, and the cost to those people if there's a data breach would be high. Careers could be ruined.
Prior to HIPAA the only example of a Fourth Amendment compliant mass database of medical info I can think of was a listing of everyone with a valid painkiller prescription in New York State. The people on the list benefited because they didn't have to be hassled by the cops, and society as a whole benefited because the cops were able to do their job of stopping prescription drug abuse more effectively. But I have no idea if they still do this since HIPAA.
I will admit that the language is a wee bit strong, but I really fucking hate it when assholes who've done 10 whole minutes of research on the internet refer to almost everyone else as Sheeple.
It's not as revisionist as you think. The Constitution is clearly intended to head off the slavery debate. Technically it was legal almost everywhere, but the Northern states were starting to abolish it and Southerners were worried a strong Federal government would impose freedom on their unwilling states. So they said flat-out exactly what was to be done about slavery, and everybody went along with that consensus for a few decades.
As for the Indians, keep in mind that under the Articles of Confederation we hadn't been able to take control of the Northwest territories. We had no Army and the states were so busy arguing over who would get the land when we finally divided it up that nobody was able to make an Army. In 1789 we passed the Constitution. In 1790 we sent the first expedition into the Territory, and it was crushed. The same thing happened a year later. Then in 1792 Mad Anthony Wayne took command. As a result of the war the Indian population of Ohio was virtually eliminated.
BTW, on the prices we paid for Indian land, most Indian tribes did not have governments in the sense that we have a government. They didn't have an elaborate legal system, with elected Sheriffs, and County Jails, to enforce the will of some central body. It was not uncommon for the US to declare some random, easily bribeable dude "Chief," give him a lifetime supply of beer (plus just enough axes and other equipment to make him important in the community) and then send in the Army to shoot anyone who insisted on not being cheated.
The US constitution was for one purpose and that was to create a union of 13 different countries (which the colonies became after independence from England and why outside the US state means country) without imposing on them outside the impacts of presenting a unified front for foreign affairs, settling disputes between the states, and providing very basic services like post office and roads, regulating interstate commerce and the such. It is all there outlined in the constitution- you can read it and it will back this up. It says nothing about what you try to claim.
I guess you're a complete moron, too, because you just agreed with me.
I wasn't saying the Constitution didn't do that stuff. I was saying that the point of the Constitution is not to protect freedom. Most of the things you mention reduce freedom by small but measurable amounts by forcing state governments to obey the Feds, despite the fact that states are closer to their people the Feds are.
And you'll note that all the things you mention helped America's WASP Middle Class conquer Indian territory (with an Army led by Mad Anthony Wayne), and protected slavery from foreign meddling, mostly by forcing the united States to have a single foreign policy and giving the Feds enough military resources that the Brits decided we'd be too much trouble to conquer.
I agree that it doesn't make much sense. Two years would make a lot more sense for most computer hardware, maybe a little more for Macs.
I suspect that early computers like UNIVAC were considered office equipment, which is on the five-year table, and that when the IRS realized one corollary for Moore's law was that computers lost value much more quickly then other five-year-property they decided switching all current computers from the five-year table to a more sensible one would be too damn complicated. Everyone would bitch that they had to use two different tables, and all the companies having a really good year would demand the ability to switch their old machines over to the two-year table so they could get a few more bucks in tax savings this year; whereas all the companies having a bad year would freak out that they had to keep track of which computer was on which table and insist that the five year table was better (because that would give them a bigger deduction next year, when they have more profits to tax). And then they'd all call their Congressman, and he'd magic up some committee hearings...
Much of US Tax law is like that. With Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances the US System is designed so that it's a massive pain to change absolutely anything, so ridiculous situations like this (and the five education tax breaks, half-dozen+ retirement accounts, etc.) never get rationalized.
Very few countries have the Constitutional protections we have, and no country that's managed to survive actually does everything privacy advocates want. If you tell everyone they're being investigated so they can do something about the investigation you are (by definition) telling 100% of the criminals you could have caught exactly when they should start destroying evidence. Some of them have official rules saying you should be notified afterwards, but I've seen no evidence those rules are followed.
And those countries have intelligence services, intelligence services that probably don;t have to file much more paperwork to wiretap then the NSA does and definitely don't have to obey the FISA Court.
Clue #1 that you're Sheeple: You think the US Constitution has anything to do with protecting freedom.
The US Constitution was created to allow the middle class of early America to get rich. Many of the activities they wanted to do were pro-freedom. Advancing technology, creating railroads, etc. are good things. But others were the exact opposite. In particular protecting slavery and stealing land from Native Americans were two of the top agenda items for the young United States.
The goal was to allow enough freedom to this very specific WASP class so that they could get rich without worrying about the government, but not so much freedom that the British, nasty abolitionists, or Natives who liked living East of the Mississippi could arrange effective resistance to their get-rich-quick schemes. In this particular case there's no way in hell that the Founders intended Quakers to have the ability to organize peaceful resistance to slavery among slaves, which is why nobody batted an eye when the Federal Post Office started reading everyone's mail and arresting anyone who dared send anti-slavery info. to the South despite the fact this seems to violate both the First and the Fourth Amendments.
Under the fourth amendment ownership of the building is irrelevant. The Fourth protects your person, papers, house, and effects. If you have a legal right to store papers you own in a place then they have the same Constitutional protections regardless of who actually owns the building. If you don't have a legal right to store them there -- maybe you leave the book where you record your illegal bets in some guys house and he finds it -- then the owner can rat your ass out and you get no Fourth Amendment protections. OTOH if the owner chooses not to rat you out the police need a warrant to search his house before they can get the book.
The debate in this case is who actually owns these records. The government is arguing that since these records are not used by you, but are generated by a private company as part of it's business, they aren't actually your records. Just as the government doesn't need a warrant to read who has a tab at the local bar it doesn't need a warrant to read the data on who you called last week.
Privacy advocates are arguing otherwise. The fact you think your records are yours is extremely important, and the NSA snooping has to stop.
In legal terms the simple fact is that the only judges who matter are not likely to side with privacy advocates, because two of them are Obama appointees unlikely to argue his attempt to get the program covered by getting the FISA Court to issue warrants was evil Fascism, a third (Roberts) appointed the FISA guys who issued said warrants, and four more are aligned with the guys who thought that we didn't warrants in the first place. Five votes to overturn the NSA will be tricky.
There're some people who're reasonable about Apple-opposition on slashdot. Unfortunately they tend not to talk much, so you get a debate between Apple fanatics (that would be me) and jerks who only stopped using the phrase "MacFag" because they got sick of being downmodded. A lot of the latter have clearly never even tried to use Macs, and definitely have no idea why somebody would rather drop off a broken computer at a store then spend the entire goddamned weekend figuring out which driver update screwed up their system.
I'd rather work with a company with ok products that fixes the ones that break free, then work with a company with better-then-ok products who are dickish about fixing the ones that break.
Do you live in a country with lots of Apple stores?
I've found that the store Geniuses are much more focused on getting things fixed for their customer then getting paid for it. Possibly this is because I like to talk to them about Apple history, so they know I've been a Macuser since '92, but I've gotten lots of great support from them basically for free.
A post I made earlier in this thread mentioned that they replaced an out-of-warranty Magsafe board for $10, and the time they let me leave my laptop in their store overnight so I could back up my data on an external drive before. But the time you bring to mind was when I spilled Dr. Pepper all over my laptop, it was out-of-warranty, I told them the problem was caused by Dr. Pepper, and they replaced it for free.
So I'm pretty sure they woulda replaced that motherboard for free if you'd told them your sob story about being stuck on a ship.
So you've never even seen one of these workstations, nobody you know has seen any of these workstations, and it will in fact be impossible for you to know how they perform for two months; yet you're confident they'll "under-perform?"
As for "basic tasks" I think you may simply be mistaken. Nobody asks graphics artists "can you replace a graphics card," during the job interview. Nobody asks "can you troubleshoot driver issues." If you can do these things you will clearly be a better a bigger asset to the company then otherwise, but they are simply not part of the basic package.
As for the wait on the phone, why didn't you just take it to the Apple store? They might charge you for the diagnosis, but the geniuses are a lot more customer-focused then the poor schmucks who man phone-banks. There are no BIOS Whitelists in Apple products. That's everyone else. It really seems like you have absolutely no experience with Apple products at all.
Did anyone ever say that your ability to choose specs was worth nothing? If you don't want Apple's specs you have the right to not buy their products.
The point of articles like this isn't to prove that a guy who needs a shitty computer with one good spec would save money on Apple, it's to prove that Apple isn't charging a premium for the actual hardware in the computer he would have gotten from Apple. He's paying more, but he's getting more too.
My general strategy in the past has been to buy their machine with the worst processor, because with that machine you pay for the least other cool hardware toys, and upgrade the RAM and HD with third-party parts. Generally I used Other World Computing. I may have to switch (possibly even from the Mac) if they keep making it harder and harder to upgrade RAM/HD.
Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?
If you're spending $10k on a computer you're probably buying at least one feature no software can take advantage of. $10k on a computer is ultra-high-end. If you're spending $10k you're betting the next version will take advantage of the feature.
And if the feature is on Apple's desktop you can be pretty sure somebody will take advantage of it, because the only software that uses both GPUs will be really easy to sell to all the people who had to buy both GPUs from Apple.
Plenty of bosses will have this because it looks cool and everyone knows it cost a lot.
But there's a lot of people in various creative fields, particularly animation and audio, who need a workstation-class computer. The ones who run their own businesses may build their own, and will probably save money that way because they know exactly what they can skimp on. Others will use it in server-farms, because it takes up very little space. All of those types will love the fact this is much more appliance-like then anything else on the market, because if it's appliance-like they don't have to hire a computer geek to get everything to work. It will just work. And then they can boast to their business friends about how much they saved on salaries, while also boasting to their business friends about how big their capital acquisitions budget is.
A major reason businesses avoid DIY systems is that with a DIY the business itself is responsible for making sure the parts all work together. They are the ones who have to figure which version of the graphics drivers will play nice with the rest of the system. Most of the time that's not a problem, but when it it is a problem it's a huge, expensive pain in the ass. Since the business is paying the guy who has to fix it, and people who can trouble-shoot such things are not cheap, it's a very expensive pain in the ass. And it's a pain in the ass you have to explain to a) your boss, who approves your budget and doesn't like seeing it wasted on idiots who can't get their computers working properly, and b) clients who have to be told their Album won't be ready because the computer guy screwed up.
OTOH if you buy a Mac somebody;s tested all that crap. And if they screwed up testing all that crap it's their fault, and they have to pay to fix it.
Or the key is understanding the price/performance matrix that moves people. I have used Macs since I was 11. This means that there is a learning curve for me in any other OS. That's worth $300 or so to me. If it's an OS without iTunes this $300 premium has to include the money I've spent on TV shows from the iTunes store.
Moreover you're ignoring support costs. Yes you can compare websites and find companies with plans that sound better then AppleCare cheaper on paper. But you can't find a company that has an actual retail store, with actual employees, who know the product, within driving distance of my house. Even if you happen to know some obscure manufacturer that has a physical store in Cuyahoga County, I doubt they'd equal the service I get at the Apple store.
For example in April my computer's battery was acting weird. It wouldn't charge. I don't have AppleCare. So I went to the Apple Store in Legacy Village to find out whether I needed a new power supply or I needed a new computer. I told them I was willing to buy a new computer. They told me that the problem was on the MagSafe board, and they could replace it for $10. A few months before that my HD's boot sector died, so I decided to buy a replacement from other world, but in the meantime I needed to back up my machine. I spent $100 on a Passport, and they let me boot up off their rescue disks and leave my machine there over the weekend backing up. None of this was part of their contractual obligations to me, and none of it got their store much money.
Yeah this great service has to be balanced with the Apple Tax and the company's decision to go with cheap power cords I destroy in 9 months, and then charge me $80 for a replacement, but it's something no DIY computer or PC manufacturer can match.
He was trying to match the specs, not save money. Part of the spec is the color of the case. Even if he ignored the case color and found a free power supply/case combo that could run workstation-class components it would only save 3.6% off the price.
At this point he can't really make a "save money" post for two reasons. First, the Mac Pro hasn't been tested under real world conditions so he has no idea which specs live up to spec and which ones don't. Given the price it's fairly safe to assume most of the specs live up to spec, but you don't really know until geeks have spent 5-6 months playing with the damn things. I suspect a performance-matching model would save money mostly in the graphics card department. Secondly many PC components don't live up to the Mac Pro spec yet. He couldn't get a motherboard that supported 64 GB of the right kind of RAM for any price, so his model costs more despite only having half the RAM. Since PC components evolve really fast it's probable that within the next few months somebody will come out with a new board supported 128 GB of RAM that's better then the Mac Pro's, and that within a year the PC-clone of the Mac Pro will be cheaper then the Mac Pro.
This would fit the historical pattern pretty well, BTW. Typically Apple announces these products and they're competitive with PCs in price/performance, but Apple doesn't cut prices aggressively so a year or two into the products life-cycle the PC is a better deal. Macfans don't buy based purely on price/performance, they buy because they want a decentish computer that will just work, and they want to know exactly who to blame if some part fails. Somebody who has a physical store within driving distance of their house, where you can show up and complain.
If you get the best deal you are probably buying from a company with no tech support budget, which means their warranty is probably not very good, and you're definitely gonna have to send your broken machine someplace and be computerless while their geeks fix it even if it turns out to be great. Build your own and you've got a different warranty for every part, and all the parts-makers can claim the problem isn't their product it's somebody-else's driver...
All services for consumers are being moved to the cloud. Even a lot of business-level stuff like Excel can be moved to the cloud.
But a lot of people have greater needs. They need a machine that has lots of RAM on their desk. They needs loads of storage on their local network. They need a processor capable of rendering complex 3D scenes. And they need it all locally because their clients won't accept the old "our ISP had lag problems this week so we didn't get the project done by the deadline." The Mac Pro is made for those people.
I'm not sure it will actually work for them, because these customers need lots of upgrade options. RA seems to be upgradeable. It should be possible to upgrade the internal HD and graphics cards, but they both involve proprietary connectors and limited internal space (you can't have multiple of each). All other cards will have to be replaced with Thunderbolt thingamabobs.
This could go a lot of ways. You could be like Apple killed floppy drives and optical drives. Everyone freaked out and bitched for a year or two and then everyone decided that they didn't need those damn things anymore anyway. Or it could be that they have to completely revamp the line next year because nobody wants a workstation-level machine that has no internal expansion slots or drive bays.
Convenience, and brand loyalty. The big soft drink brands make it really easy to buy their products, frequently paying for choice shelf space right by the exit. Moreover in absolute terms you don;t actually save much money if you buy the house brand because the worst price you'll see on a 2-liter is $2.50. Yeah the house brand may only be $0.50, but the $2.00 you save won't get you bus-fare in Cleveland.
Coke brand loyalty has to be seen to believed. Large sections of thew country refer to any carbonated beverage as "Coke." In the early 80s Coke was losing taste-tests (and market-share) to Pepsi left and right so they changed the flavor to eliminate the distinctive bitter after-taste. There was a consumer rebellion, which didn't end until hated New Coke was removed from the store shelves and old Coke (now referred to as "Coke Classic") returned grocery stores throughout the land. And it's almost entirely based on that red label and being the brand you drank when you were kids:
http://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/blind-taste-test-ranking-9-classic-colas-from-mexican-coke-to-zevia Quotes from this taste's panel of coke-drinkers included "I like that, it's less chemical than the others."; "Sort of RC Cola-esque."; and "That flavor is brown." Again most of these people are Coke-drinkers, in a taste-test that they knew included Coke, were unable to tell which one was Coke. Coke made with cane sugar (aka: Mexican Coke) was referred to as Coke, despite the fact American Coke hasn't used cane sugar for decades.
Pretty much the only thing they all agree on is that excessive taxes and unreasonable regulations are evil. Even then they don't actually agree on what that sentence means. The guy whose job is to sell coal thinks any carbon tax is excessive by definition and renewable energy requirements are inherently unreasonable. The guy who sells solar panels disagrees strongly.
In this case what's going on is that your local yogurt shop doesn't give a shit about patents or copyright because it sells yogurt. They don't have patents or copyrights. They do have a trademark, but unless some other yogurt shop has recently moved in and adopted a similar name they probably don't think of their trademark as important to their business. And their one vote is as important as Exon's.
It would be interesting to do a study weighting the response by the actual economic importance of the business. But that would be really fucking hard, particularly if you're only trying to tease out a couple aspects of IP law. The article mentions a government study that tried to do this, and criticizes it for including grocer's as important users of IP, but if you think about it for a second grocery stores use IP a lot more often then anybody else. If you're a geek obsessed with the IP implications of file sharing and the Samsung/Apple patent battles that sounds like ridiculous BS, but that's only because you aren't counting trademarks as Intellectual property. Coke is more expensive then RC Cola or the house brand for the same reason. Most people who buy Coke couldn't tell the difference between it and the house brand, but the grocery store probably charges double or triple for Coke, particularly if the House Brand is sold in 3-litre bottles. That markup is 100% due to the intellectual property of the Coca-Cole trademark. Yeah the music industry and software will use this trademark info to claim all Walmart associates will be fired the second that copyright is weakened, but that does not mean the government scientists were technically wrong for saying those Walmart associates are working for a business that is very dependent on the IP of trademarks.
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
You know why we need Obamacare? Because people seriously argue that they should be rewarded for picking an insurer who turns away chicks with the breast cancer gene with low low rates.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
How's the insurer even gonna know you lied about the financials? And you do have to actually lie, because it is connected to the iRS database, so it'll remind you how much you actually made.
If you do lie, you'll get in trouble, but it'll be with the Feds for tax fraud.
Was any of it medical? The site is supposed to ask for three things: your address (to find out which policies are available in your area), your age (because insurers can charge older people more), and a bunch of financial info (your current policy, income, options offered by your employer, current income, etc.) to determine whether you're eligible for tax subsidies. Khallow was talking about that fun thing insurers do where they demand a 15-page medical history, and then throw you off your insurance because you said you'd gotten antibiotics twice and they found three prescriptions. The only info that could be used that way is the age/address info.
I'm not saying that lying about the shit in that third group is a good idea. Messing with the IRS (who administer the subsidies) is never a good idea. But it ain't gonna get your insurance cancelled.
The relaunch was on Saturday November 30th. It's Saturday December 7th. The entire post-relaunch period is last week.
This article is like bitching about how terrible Windows 3.11 was the week after MS launched Windows 95. No shit 8 days ago Windows sucked, that's why they re-did the damn thing.
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There's probably all kinds of little things like this that a determined group of 50 guys with legal firearms could do. The kinds of guns people talk about banning are probably less scary then real old-timey blackpowder guns, because making blackpowder is legal, and that shit could totally take out a bridge. So our 50 guys could ruin your commute, probably destroy the local sewer lines, take out a police station or three, etc. Hell I'd be stunned if it took five guys with 22s to storm a nuclear plant. You'd probably need more if you didn't have inside information on the plant's security, but not that much more.
The reason this shit doesn't happen is that it's really hard to get 50 guys to agree on a single operation without one of them ratting everyone out to the cops. For all that we bitch about our government, and the amount of times said government deserves to be bitched at, things have not gotten so bad that people think starting a Civil War is a good idea. Even in subcultures where you can get people to agree to fight the Power, generally by the time you've picked up two dozen guys you've picked up some loser who will be caught. Remember that the FBI in Minnesota had Zacarias Moussaoui in custody on immigration charges, and they had a pretty good idea that he was planning on crashing a plane into something, but they weren't able to convince anyone in DC to take them seriously.
I'm not the best person to ask about that, because there's extra regulations involved. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) lots of patient information is protected from disclosure. Disclosing it wrongly can get medical professionals in deep trouble (including putting their licenses in jeopardy), but they are supposed to turn info over "when legally required." More important then the legal niceties, almost no healthcare professional will turn over a patient record without first being informed by his lawyer that, yes, under HIPAA he is supposed to turn over said record. In writing. Two copies. Of actual writing, with an actual signature (ie: not a print-out). One for his home files which he knows nobody will mess with, and one for work, where he may have to use it.
Keep in mind there's supposed to be a cost/benefit analysis to all governmental data collection. If the benefits outweigh the costs the search is reasonable, and thus allowed. The benefit to the government (and thus the society that created the government) of knowing the numbers every drug dealer is dialing is very high. It helps cops do their jobs and lock up very destructive people, so it's easy to calculate in dollar terms. The cost in privacy rights is impossible to calculate in dollar terms, and therefore $0.00 in most court-rooms. With medical data the cost/benefit is much different. There is no benefit to law enforcement knowing every person on anti-depressants, and the cost to those people if there's a data breach would be high. Careers could be ruined.
Prior to HIPAA the only example of a Fourth Amendment compliant mass database of medical info I can think of was a listing of everyone with a valid painkiller prescription in New York State. The people on the list benefited because they didn't have to be hassled by the cops, and society as a whole benefited because the cops were able to do their job of stopping prescription drug abuse more effectively. But I have no idea if they still do this since HIPAA.
I will admit that the language is a wee bit strong, but I really fucking hate it when assholes who've done 10 whole minutes of research on the internet refer to almost everyone else as Sheeple.
It's not as revisionist as you think. The Constitution is clearly intended to head off the slavery debate. Technically it was legal almost everywhere, but the Northern states were starting to abolish it and Southerners were worried a strong Federal government would impose freedom on their unwilling states. So they said flat-out exactly what was to be done about slavery, and everybody went along with that consensus for a few decades.
As for the Indians, keep in mind that under the Articles of Confederation we hadn't been able to take control of the Northwest territories. We had no Army and the states were so busy arguing over who would get the land when we finally divided it up that nobody was able to make an Army. In 1789 we passed the Constitution. In 1790 we sent the first expedition into the Territory, and it was crushed. The same thing happened a year later. Then in 1792 Mad Anthony Wayne took command. As a result of the war the Indian population of Ohio was virtually eliminated.
BTW, on the prices we paid for Indian land, most Indian tribes did not have governments in the sense that we have a government. They didn't have an elaborate legal system, with elected Sheriffs, and County Jails, to enforce the will of some central body. It was not uncommon for the US to declare some random, easily bribeable dude "Chief," give him a lifetime supply of beer (plus just enough axes and other equipment to make him important in the community) and then send in the Army to shoot anyone who insisted on not being cheated.
Wow, you are a complete moron.
The US constitution was for one purpose and that was to create a union of 13 different countries (which the colonies became after independence from England and why outside the US state means country) without imposing on them outside the impacts of presenting a unified front for foreign affairs, settling disputes between the states, and providing very basic services like post office and roads, regulating interstate commerce and the such. It is all there outlined in the constitution- you can read it and it will back this up. It says nothing about what you try to claim.
I guess you're a complete moron, too, because you just agreed with me.
I wasn't saying the Constitution didn't do that stuff. I was saying that the point of the Constitution is not to protect freedom. Most of the things you mention reduce freedom by small but measurable amounts by forcing state governments to obey the Feds, despite the fact that states are closer to their people the Feds are.
And you'll note that all the things you mention helped America's WASP Middle Class conquer Indian territory (with an Army led by Mad Anthony Wayne), and protected slavery from foreign meddling, mostly by forcing the united States to have a single foreign policy and giving the Feds enough military resources that the Brits decided we'd be too much trouble to conquer.
I agree that it doesn't make much sense. Two years would make a lot more sense for most computer hardware, maybe a little more for Macs.
I suspect that early computers like UNIVAC were considered office equipment, which is on the five-year table, and that when the IRS realized one corollary for Moore's law was that computers lost value much more quickly then other five-year-property they decided switching all current computers from the five-year table to a more sensible one would be too damn complicated. Everyone would bitch that they had to use two different tables, and all the companies having a really good year would demand the ability to switch their old machines over to the two-year table so they could get a few more bucks in tax savings this year; whereas all the companies having a bad year would freak out that they had to keep track of which computer was on which table and insist that the five year table was better (because that would give them a bigger deduction next year, when they have more profits to tax). And then they'd all call their Congressman, and he'd magic up some committee hearings...
Much of US Tax law is like that. With Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances the US System is designed so that it's a massive pain to change absolutely anything, so ridiculous situations like this (and the five education tax breaks, half-dozen+ retirement accounts, etc.) never get rationalized.
Outside the USA won't help much.
Very few countries have the Constitutional protections we have, and no country that's managed to survive actually does everything privacy advocates want. If you tell everyone they're being investigated so they can do something about the investigation you are (by definition) telling 100% of the criminals you could have caught exactly when they should start destroying evidence. Some of them have official rules saying you should be notified afterwards, but I've seen no evidence those rules are followed.
And those countries have intelligence services, intelligence services that probably don;t have to file much more paperwork to wiretap then the NSA does and definitely don't have to obey the FISA Court.
Clue #1 that you're Sheeple:
You think the US Constitution has anything to do with protecting freedom.
The US Constitution was created to allow the middle class of early America to get rich. Many of the activities they wanted to do were pro-freedom. Advancing technology, creating railroads, etc. are good things. But others were the exact opposite. In particular protecting slavery and stealing land from Native Americans were two of the top agenda items for the young United States.
The goal was to allow enough freedom to this very specific WASP class so that they could get rich without worrying about the government, but not so much freedom that the British, nasty abolitionists, or Natives who liked living East of the Mississippi could arrange effective resistance to their get-rich-quick schemes. In this particular case there's no way in hell that the Founders intended Quakers to have the ability to organize peaceful resistance to slavery among slaves, which is why nobody batted an eye when the Federal Post Office started reading everyone's mail and arresting anyone who dared send anti-slavery info. to the South despite the fact this seems to violate both the First and the Fourth Amendments.
Under the fourth amendment ownership of the building is irrelevant. The Fourth protects your person, papers, house, and effects. If you have a legal right to store papers you own in a place then they have the same Constitutional protections regardless of who actually owns the building. If you don't have a legal right to store them there -- maybe you leave the book where you record your illegal bets in some guys house and he finds it -- then the owner can rat your ass out and you get no Fourth Amendment protections. OTOH if the owner chooses not to rat you out the police need a warrant to search his house before they can get the book.
The debate in this case is who actually owns these records. The government is arguing that since these records are not used by you, but are generated by a private company as part of it's business, they aren't actually your records. Just as the government doesn't need a warrant to read who has a tab at the local bar it doesn't need a warrant to read the data on who you called last week.
Privacy advocates are arguing otherwise. The fact you think your records are yours is extremely important, and the NSA snooping has to stop.
In legal terms the simple fact is that the only judges who matter are not likely to side with privacy advocates, because two of them are Obama appointees unlikely to argue his attempt to get the program covered by getting the FISA Court to issue warrants was evil Fascism, a third (Roberts) appointed the FISA guys who issued said warrants, and four more are aligned with the guys who thought that we didn't warrants in the first place. Five votes to overturn the NSA will be tricky.
There're some people who're reasonable about Apple-opposition on slashdot. Unfortunately they tend not to talk much, so you get a debate between Apple fanatics (that would be me) and jerks who only stopped using the phrase "MacFag" because they got sick of being downmodded. A lot of the latter have clearly never even tried to use Macs, and definitely have no idea why somebody would rather drop off a broken computer at a store then spend the entire goddamned weekend figuring out which driver update screwed up their system.
I'd rather work with a company with ok products that fixes the ones that break free, then work with a company with better-then-ok products who are dickish about fixing the ones that break.
Which is why I'm typing this from a MacBook.
Do you live in a country with lots of Apple stores?
I've found that the store Geniuses are much more focused on getting things fixed for their customer then getting paid for it. Possibly this is because I like to talk to them about Apple history, so they know I've been a Macuser since '92, but I've gotten lots of great support from them basically for free.
A post I made earlier in this thread mentioned that they replaced an out-of-warranty Magsafe board for $10, and the time they let me leave my laptop in their store overnight so I could back up my data on an external drive before. But the time you bring to mind was when I spilled Dr. Pepper all over my laptop, it was out-of-warranty, I told them the problem was caused by Dr. Pepper, and they replaced it for free.
So I'm pretty sure they woulda replaced that motherboard for free if you'd told them your sob story about being stuck on a ship.
So you've never even seen one of these workstations, nobody you know has seen any of these workstations, and it will in fact be impossible for you to know how they perform for two months; yet you're confident they'll "under-perform?"
As for "basic tasks" I think you may simply be mistaken. Nobody asks graphics artists "can you replace a graphics card," during the job interview. Nobody asks "can you troubleshoot driver issues." If you can do these things you will clearly be a better a bigger asset to the company then otherwise, but they are simply not part of the basic package.
As for the wait on the phone, why didn't you just take it to the Apple store? They might charge you for the diagnosis, but the geniuses are a lot more customer-focused then the poor schmucks who man phone-banks. There are no BIOS Whitelists in Apple products. That's everyone else. It really seems like you have absolutely no experience with Apple products at all.
Did anyone ever say that your ability to choose specs was worth nothing? If you don't want Apple's specs you have the right to not buy their products.
The point of articles like this isn't to prove that a guy who needs a shitty computer with one good spec would save money on Apple, it's to prove that Apple isn't charging a premium for the actual hardware in the computer he would have gotten from Apple. He's paying more, but he's getting more too.
My general strategy in the past has been to buy their machine with the worst processor, because with that machine you pay for the least other cool hardware toys, and upgrade the RAM and HD with third-party parts. Generally I used Other World Computing. I may have to switch (possibly even from the Mac) if they keep making it harder and harder to upgrade RAM/HD.
Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?
If you're spending $10k on a computer you're probably buying at least one feature no software can take advantage of. $10k on a computer is ultra-high-end. If you're spending $10k you're betting the next version will take advantage of the feature.
And if the feature is on Apple's desktop you can be pretty sure somebody will take advantage of it, because the only software that uses both GPUs will be really easy to sell to all the people who had to buy both GPUs from Apple.
You're not the IRS. All Computers and peripheral equipment depreciate using the Five-year table:
http://www.irs.gov/Help-&-Resources/Tools-&-FAQs/FAQs-for-Individuals/Frequently-Asked-Tax-Questions-&-Answers/Sale-or-Trade-of-Business,-Depreciation,-Rentals/Depreciation-&-Recapture/Depreciation-&-Recapture
Plenty of bosses will have this because it looks cool and everyone knows it cost a lot.
But there's a lot of people in various creative fields, particularly animation and audio, who need a workstation-class computer. The ones who run their own businesses may build their own, and will probably save money that way because they know exactly what they can skimp on. Others will use it in server-farms, because it takes up very little space. All of those types will love the fact this is much more appliance-like then anything else on the market, because if it's appliance-like they don't have to hire a computer geek to get everything to work. It will just work. And then they can boast to their business friends about how much they saved on salaries, while also boasting to their business friends about how big their capital acquisitions budget is.
I'd say mod parent up, but you're already at +5.
A major reason businesses avoid DIY systems is that with a DIY the business itself is responsible for making sure the parts all work together. They are the ones who have to figure which version of the graphics drivers will play nice with the rest of the system. Most of the time that's not a problem, but when it it is a problem it's a huge, expensive pain in the ass. Since the business is paying the guy who has to fix it, and people who can trouble-shoot such things are not cheap, it's a very expensive pain in the ass. And it's a pain in the ass you have to explain to a) your boss, who approves your budget and doesn't like seeing it wasted on idiots who can't get their computers working properly, and b) clients who have to be told their Album won't be ready because the computer guy screwed up.
OTOH if you buy a Mac somebody;s tested all that crap. And if they screwed up testing all that crap it's their fault, and they have to pay to fix it.
Or the key is understanding the price/performance matrix that moves people. I have used Macs since I was 11. This means that there is a learning curve for me in any other OS. That's worth $300 or so to me. If it's an OS without iTunes this $300 premium has to include the money I've spent on TV shows from the iTunes store.
Moreover you're ignoring support costs. Yes you can compare websites and find companies with plans that sound better then AppleCare cheaper on paper. But you can't find a company that has an actual retail store, with actual employees, who know the product, within driving distance of my house. Even if you happen to know some obscure manufacturer that has a physical store in Cuyahoga County, I doubt they'd equal the service I get at the Apple store.
For example in April my computer's battery was acting weird. It wouldn't charge. I don't have AppleCare. So I went to the Apple Store in Legacy Village to find out whether I needed a new power supply or I needed a new computer. I told them I was willing to buy a new computer. They told me that the problem was on the MagSafe board, and they could replace it for $10. A few months before that my HD's boot sector died, so I decided to buy a replacement from other world, but in the meantime I needed to back up my machine. I spent $100 on a Passport, and they let me boot up off their rescue disks and leave my machine there over the weekend backing up. None of this was part of their contractual obligations to me, and none of it got their store much money.
Yeah this great service has to be balanced with the Apple Tax and the company's decision to go with cheap power cords I destroy in 9 months, and then charge me $80 for a replacement, but it's something no DIY computer or PC manufacturer can match.
He was trying to match the specs, not save money. Part of the spec is the color of the case. Even if he ignored the case color and found a free power supply/case combo that could run workstation-class components it would only save 3.6% off the price.
At this point he can't really make a "save money" post for two reasons. First, the Mac Pro hasn't been tested under real world conditions so he has no idea which specs live up to spec and which ones don't. Given the price it's fairly safe to assume most of the specs live up to spec, but you don't really know until geeks have spent 5-6 months playing with the damn things. I suspect a performance-matching model would save money mostly in the graphics card department. Secondly many PC components don't live up to the Mac Pro spec yet. He couldn't get a motherboard that supported 64 GB of the right kind of RAM for any price, so his model costs more despite only having half the RAM. Since PC components evolve really fast it's probable that within the next few months somebody will come out with a new board supported 128 GB of RAM that's better then the Mac Pro's, and that within a year the PC-clone of the Mac Pro will be cheaper then the Mac Pro.
This would fit the historical pattern pretty well, BTW. Typically Apple announces these products and they're competitive with PCs in price/performance, but Apple doesn't cut prices aggressively so a year or two into the products life-cycle the PC is a better deal. Macfans don't buy based purely on price/performance, they buy because they want a decentish computer that will just work, and they want to know exactly who to blame if some part fails. Somebody who has a physical store within driving distance of their house, where you can show up and complain.
If you get the best deal you are probably buying from a company with no tech support budget, which means their warranty is probably not very good, and you're definitely gonna have to send your broken machine someplace and be computerless while their geeks fix it even if it turns out to be great. Build your own and you've got a different warranty for every part, and all the parts-makers can claim the problem isn't their product it's somebody-else's driver...
All services for consumers are being moved to the cloud. Even a lot of business-level stuff like Excel can be moved to the cloud.
But a lot of people have greater needs. They need a machine that has lots of RAM on their desk. They needs loads of storage on their local network. They need a processor capable of rendering complex 3D scenes. And they need it all locally because their clients won't accept the old "our ISP had lag problems this week so we didn't get the project done by the deadline." The Mac Pro is made for those people.
I'm not sure it will actually work for them, because these customers need lots of upgrade options. RA seems to be upgradeable. It should be possible to upgrade the internal HD and graphics cards, but they both involve proprietary connectors and limited internal space (you can't have multiple of each). All other cards will have to be replaced with Thunderbolt thingamabobs.
This could go a lot of ways. You could be like Apple killed floppy drives and optical drives. Everyone freaked out and bitched for a year or two and then everyone decided that they didn't need those damn things anymore anyway. Or it could be that they have to completely revamp the line next year because nobody wants a workstation-level machine that has no internal expansion slots or drive bays.
Convenience, and brand loyalty. The big soft drink brands make it really easy to buy their products, frequently paying for choice shelf space right by the exit. Moreover in absolute terms you don;t actually save much money if you buy the house brand because the worst price you'll see on a 2-liter is $2.50. Yeah the house brand may only be $0.50, but the $2.00 you save won't get you bus-fare in Cleveland.
Coke brand loyalty has to be seen to believed. Large sections of thew country refer to any carbonated beverage as "Coke." In the early 80s Coke was losing taste-tests (and market-share) to Pepsi left and right so they changed the flavor to eliminate the distinctive bitter after-taste. There was a consumer rebellion, which didn't end until hated New Coke was removed from the store shelves and old Coke (now referred to as "Coke Classic") returned grocery stores throughout the land. And it's almost entirely based on that red label and being the brand you drank when you were kids:
http://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/blind-taste-test-ranking-9-classic-colas-from-mexican-coke-to-zevia
Quotes from this taste's panel of coke-drinkers included "I like that, it's less chemical than the others."; "Sort of RC Cola-esque."; and "That flavor is brown." Again most of these people are Coke-drinkers, in a taste-test that they knew included Coke, were unable to tell which one was Coke. Coke made with cane sugar (aka: Mexican Coke) was referred to as Coke, despite the fact American Coke hasn't used cane sugar for decades.
Pretty much the only thing they all agree on is that excessive taxes and unreasonable regulations are evil. Even then they don't actually agree on what that sentence means. The guy whose job is to sell coal thinks any carbon tax is excessive by definition and renewable energy requirements are inherently unreasonable. The guy who sells solar panels disagrees strongly.
In this case what's going on is that your local yogurt shop doesn't give a shit about patents or copyright because it sells yogurt. They don't have patents or copyrights. They do have a trademark, but unless some other yogurt shop has recently moved in and adopted a similar name they probably don't think of their trademark as important to their business. And their one vote is as important as Exon's.
It would be interesting to do a study weighting the response by the actual economic importance of the business. But that would be really fucking hard, particularly if you're only trying to tease out a couple aspects of IP law. The article mentions a government study that tried to do this, and criticizes it for including grocer's as important users of IP, but if you think about it for a second grocery stores use IP a lot more often then anybody else. If you're a geek obsessed with the IP implications of file sharing and the Samsung/Apple patent battles that sounds like ridiculous BS, but that's only because you aren't counting trademarks as Intellectual property. Coke is more expensive then RC Cola or the house brand for the same reason. Most people who buy Coke couldn't tell the difference between it and the house brand, but the grocery store probably charges double or triple for Coke, particularly if the House Brand is sold in 3-litre bottles. That markup is 100% due to the intellectual property of the Coca-Cole trademark. Yeah the music industry and software will use this trademark info to claim all Walmart associates will be fired the second that copyright is weakened, but that does not mean the government scientists were technically wrong for saying those Walmart associates are working for a business that is very dependent on the IP of trademarks.
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
You know why we need Obamacare? Because people seriously argue that they should be rewarded for picking an insurer who turns away chicks with the breast cancer gene with low low rates.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
How's the insurer even gonna know you lied about the financials? And you do have to actually lie, because it is connected to the iRS database, so it'll remind you how much you actually made.
If you do lie, you'll get in trouble, but it'll be with the Feds for tax fraud.
Was any of it medical? The site is supposed to ask for three things: your address (to find out which policies are available in your area), your age (because insurers can charge older people more), and a bunch of financial info (your current policy, income, options offered by your employer, current income, etc.) to determine whether you're eligible for tax subsidies. Khallow was talking about that fun thing insurers do where they demand a 15-page medical history, and then throw you off your insurance because you said you'd gotten antibiotics twice and they found three prescriptions. The only info that could be used that way is the age/address info.
I'm not saying that lying about the shit in that third group is a good idea. Messing with the IRS (who administer the subsidies) is never a good idea. But it ain't gonna get your insurance cancelled.
The relaunch was on Saturday November 30th. It's Saturday December 7th. The entire post-relaunch period is last week.
This article is like bitching about how terrible Windows 3.11 was the week after MS launched Windows 95. No shit 8 days ago Windows sucked, that's why they re-did the damn thing.