but you'll never see it if your TV can't natively display 1080p (or at least 720) Having experienced both, I'd still pick upscaled DVD on a well calibrated, high quality 720p or 1080i TV than BluRay on the majority of 1080p TVs as they come out of the box.
Yes, extra resolution is a wonderful thing. IF you can see it.
Lousy upscaled DVD to lousy 1080p gives you lots more lousy pixels and a nice, reassuring feeling. Look how sharp the artificial edges of the overblown sharpening settings are now! Look how you can really get a sense of the edge of the large area that's lost in the shadows. Look how black that giant smudge is!
Or a properly calibrated set showing a DVD at its best will suddenly bring a ton of subtle detail out of the shadows, out of the blown out highlights. That mass of red cloth suddenly gains subtle variations that show the stitching, etc.
Given a choice between upping 50 near uniform red pixels to 300 near uniform red pixels or 50 near uniform red pixels to 50 beautifully varying ones, I'll always choose the latter.
So, yes, 1080p is always going to beat upscaled DVD on the same setup. But a good set, properly calibrated, vs. the majority of crap that's out there, is also always going to be a bigger improvement still.
If you have the money, get the 120hz 1080p set that's at the top of everyone's line. Plug in BluRay, marvel at the whole experience.
If you don't have the money and you have to compromise somewhere, you'll be better served by putting the price of the $500 BluRay player in to a better picture (note: I said better, not bigger) and the Avia Home Theater calibration DVD. You'll get a far bigger improvement from upconverting regular DVDs on a great set than you will from displaying a high definition source through crap.
Besides, three movies later at current costs, you'll have saved so much by buying regular DVDs, you can now buy that BluRay player anyway - and now it'll be plugged in to a great display.
The web, along with HTML, has been available since, what, '93?
They didn't file the patent until '99.
If it's that obvious, one would assume there's prior art from that six year window.
If it had been filed in say '95 when there wasn't that much interest in the web yet, that'd be one thing. By '99, a hell of a lot of people were using it and filing IPOs as fast as they could come up with ideas.
The alternative explanation would be that it wasn't all that obvious and the obviousness either comes from retrospect or misreading what the patent actually implies.
Just an observation but outrage, as often as not, comes from misunderstanding all of the details and circumstances. Sure, this is obvious and outrageous... from a short summary. Apparently it wasn't to those judging it with more information. It may be they were hoodwinked. Possibly more likely is there's more to it than a lay interpretation of a web summary.
As Joel Spolsky pointed out on his blog JoelOnSoftware, 99.999% is pretty much fictional.
99.999% over a year is 31.526 seconds.
No matter how good your staff, no matter how many people you have on site, no matter how robust your systems, no matter how many failsafes you have standing by, ready to be plugged in...
IF something does go down, even the fastest tech on earth is unlikely to identify, pull out, replace and have fired back up whatever the faulty item is in under 30 seconds.
99.999% uptime is essentially fictional. It's simply an impressive sounding number that says, "We'll do everything realistically possible to keep you up 100% of the time. In a typical year, you won't see anything bring you down. You can now tell your investors/clients this and make them feel warm and fuzzy."
It ignores the second part, "But, honestly, if it does go down, we won't have it back within 30 seconds, 100% of the time. Sorry, but welcome to reality. But, for what it's worth, our board's happy to pay you outage fees because it's a small enough risk and the amounts are capped enough, that we're happy to take the risk and costs in exchange for advertising a service we know no one can deliver."
Let's look at regulated phone service, the example in the original post. Can anyone point to a major carrier that hasn't had a major outage at some point? Be it an idiot in a switch room, a power outage affecting a whole side of the country, an anchor ripping up an undersea cable? And how many of them have actually been back within the mandated 30 seconds?
It doesn't happen. That two hour outage is going to take quarter of a millenium of absolutely no more faults to earn back at 30 seconds/year. With luck, it only hit one in 250 customers so you can pretend you're well within your 99.999% uptime but that 1 in 250 isn't really going to agree they got 99.999% after they were down for 1:59:30 more than their contract said they would be.
So, no, 99.999% doesn't exist. It's just a really cool story we tell ourselves whilst being willing to pay whatever the penalties are for missing it, on rare occasions, in exchange for great advertising.
If you're a fan of having your files emailed to you when the drive gets around to it, that's awesome. For everyone else, pretty much the only option is to upgrade to the solid state drive... at which point the price tag is massively higher.
Granted, the Acer only has a 5400rpm drive rather than an infinitely preferable 7200... and it certainly doesn't compete with the much faster solid state drive... but it's still a big step over the 4200.
Either way, the Air also comes with 2GB vs. 4GB of ram (still more than adequate right now but Moore's Law (yes, I know it's a semi-misquote) means you'll lament it well within the life of the machine).
Then again, to be fair, their only argument in favor of the Air over the Acer was that it was prettier and $60 cheaper.
Maybe CNN doesn't like the competition scattered independent bloggers are providing to its all-encompassing media empire, and are taking out their anger on one of their own who dared embrace new media? Are there any tech people here who don't have a non compete clause in their contract that says, "You may not use knowledge you gained through your position here for external projects without company approval?"
This is a news producer, given access at CNN's dime, blogging about it for his own use (and potentially collecting ad revenue too).
It wouldn't be considered acceptable in any other field. A programmer releasing code to things he was exposed to on the company's time, a record label employee running a celebrity gossip paper, they'd all be facing disciplinary action. Why is a news producer any different?
The material is synthesised from fatty acids and urea. And if this isn't an argument why adding fiber to your diet is important, nothing'll convince you.
and work on multicore chips has intensified the hunt for parallel programming. Try down the back of the couch. Whenever born again Christians come to the door and ask me if I've found Jesus, that's where I tell them he was all along. Everything ends up there eventually.
A very large number of owners of ASUS P5N-E motherboards are reporting the same issue simply with recent updates. It's quite likely the SP1 update is simply triggering the same issue.
Here's a google search on the issue. You'll notice a common thread is that P5N-E owners have the issue, users of other motherboards don't see it.
It's been happening since mid January, from what I can gather, and I'm not finding any solutions to it yet.
From what I understand, the amount has nothing to do with the value of the laptop...
It has everything to do with a refusal to acknowledge they'd lost it, making constant excuses for a long time, followed by a refusal to pay up promptly even what it was undeniable.
It was only after she threatened to sue for the large amount that they finally got around to paying the smaller amount. Until they were in danger, they weren't in any hurry to deal with it.
There's often minimal incentive to avoid repeating the mistake if all you ever have to pay is actual physical cost, ignoring value of lost data, and you can get away with postponing making that payment, requiring endless forms of validation, follow up calls where they sit on hold for hours, etc. until they give up.
The idea of punative damages is that it's accepted that a bare minimum effort doesn't come close to being adequate and a dramatically higher cost is required to spur them in to acting in the way they knew they should have in the first place.
If BestBuy had got on and acknowledge the loss, promptly paying up, they likely wouldn't be facing this. Instead, their responding only when threatened with large punative damages, demonstrated that that's exactly what's necessary to get them to truly fulfill their obligations.
Had she asked for millions the instant they lost it, she'd get laughed out of court. That they demonstrated a complete unwillingness to address the issue until they were faced with that kind of a threat is going to get noted in a court case.
She'll unlikely see the $50m+. She'll be lucky if she sees $5m that gets reduced to $500k on appeal. But the pain of facing that, getting lawyers involved and all the rest of it is going to make an impression on BB policy for the future far more than any number of angry letters will.
The director of a Spanish vigilante organization has claimed that the internet 'creates pedophiles' In shocking news, vigilantes with little respect for due process, who work their asses off to entrap people via a given medium, find that there are strangely more people in that medium.
It may be the medium...
Or it may be the idiots going around trying to entrap out of a sense of outraged righteousness.
There's a reason why cops aren't allowed to go up to guys on the street, hit on them, take an otherwise disinterested person and pretty much seduce him, drop in that it'll cost him, then prompty arrest him for solicitation. It's called entrapment. You're not catching criminals, you're making them where they didn't otherwise exist.
Unfortunately, as To Catch A Predator has demonstrated, vigilante groups set up, hide their own law breaking, then self congratulate whe they manage to catch people who may well never have been an issue save for their aggressive response.
Who's the real criminal here? The person who was minding their own business but slipped up when pressure sold? Or the person who does every last thing they can to inspire the crime and then self congratulates themselves for catching it?
Yes, the internet breeds paedophiles. The question is whether it's anything inherrent in the net... or if it's the by product of righteous but misguided idiots who do everything they can to entrap people.
If Nevada is such a great, efficient state then I see no reason why Microsoft shouldn't move their actual operation there, instead of just maintaining a front for tax evasion purposes.
And, as you file your own tax returns this year, I'll bet you carefully record each internet transaction from out of state, ensuring that you pay full taxes even though it would have been easy to avoid it? Of course, your charitable deductions will be paid at the lower rate you really know your junk was worth rather than the higher "standard rate" you know you can get away with? Similarly, when you realize your itemized receipts don't add up to as much as the standard deduction, you'll still take the lower amount you know you really deserve? You'll also stop using lower rate credit cards issued out of Delaware in favor of higher rate ones from your own state?
Sure, you could be saving money on your own taxes. But won't anybody think of the children in your own state who are in cramped classes because there aren't enough tax dollars. Thank God for people like you who make a point of paying every dollar they can, rather than looking for the best possible savings.
When an individual figures out ways to avoid paying taxes - or paying as little as possible - it's considered frugal. When a corporation does it, it's evil?
...Ultra-short pulses of laser light to etch nano features into the surface of metals so that they can absorb or reflect specific wavelengths of light.
This is very similar to the way that butterflies get the color in their wings. And there I was thinking it had something to do with cocoons.
'I don't know of a business where you can get away with raiding a customer with armed marshals and expect them to continue to do business with you...' To be fair, most likely, he wasn't actually doing business with them in the first place. He was installing free copies. Taking your business, which brings them absolutely zero, elsewhere is going to result in a net suffering of... absolutely zero to them.
It's kind of like the guy at a market, selling pirated DVDs, having got raided and saying, "Just see if I stock MPAA movies now!"
To hurt someone, by taking your business away from them, you actually have to have had some intent to give them real business (as opposed to simply using unpaid copies) in the first place.
The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity. There goes their plan to stack defenseless toasters in pyramids, connect wires to them and tell them that if they fall they'll get short circuited.
It sadly says a lot about humans that it's not exactly a high bar to reach.
Seeing as you don't actually pay anything for the Silver service, vs the Gold Ignoring the $399 people paid for the console that was advertised as offering it.
I don't pay a monthly service fee to Microsoft to "permit" net access on my PC either. I bought the OS with it made pretty clear that I could reasonably expect access as part of what I'd already paid. If they sent out a forced update to all copies of XP that disabled net access in an effort to encourage users to move to Vista, I'd consider it pretty legitimate to be pissed off there too.
Apologists let them get away with selling game systems with the promise of immediate access to demos, only to then artificially delay access by a week to make the pay service more appealing. Let's not convince them that we see what remains of the Silver service that was sold as part of the initial $399 price tag as a bonus we aren't entitled to either.
Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands. When my connection could manage text, I sucked down all the text I could get. When my connection could manage images, I sucked down all the images I could get. When my connection could manage audio... OK, I'm one of the few that still buys audio. When my connection could manage 320x240 video, I sucked down all I could get of that too. Now I'm downloading HD movie trailers and full CD at a time OS images and game demos.
If the content were available, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be stopping at 1920x1080 HD video. Monitors can already handle 2560x1600 fairly commonly and all we're waiting for is someone to come up with a way to put multi-angle video in a single steam.
What's been the limiting factor throughout? Bandwidth availability. As soon as it's available (or just becoming available), someone releases their next great idea that just hadn't taken off so far because the files were too slow to download.
Cable companies can release 100mbps lines... They can up to 1gbps, 10gbp, 100gbps... And we'll come up with cool ways to use them.
That's not to imply they shouldn't invest in new technologies and keep moving forward... but "just give people more" isn't a real solution either. That more will never be enough and you'll be back in the same position.
Realizing I'm going to be mocked as the "the intertubes are a series of roads" guy... It does have a lot of parallels to the road construction argument.
To many people, most even, the answer's simple: If there's congestion, build more and bigger roads.
The thing is, all the research demonstrates that people will drive up to a given pain threshold. You reduce the amount of pain they feel... they drive more until they're back up to it. You spend a whole load of money, destroy the environment, and everyone complains just as much about how sucky traffic is.
Of course, refuse to build more roads and you very quickly get voted out of office by angry commuters who "know" the system far better than any researchers with their numbers ever could. On the internets, we call them discussion boards.
I've just signed up for fiber optic to the home. My TV signal is now getting delivered over my internet connection as IPTV - which should free up the TV spectrum to deliver internet - which I can then get IPTV on.
I think my head hurts. But I'm pretty sure we invented perpetual motion somewhere in there.
Sadly, it's the case that humans tend to suck massively at risk assessment.
"I'm young, I'm sure as hell not going to pay $500/month for health insurance. I'm too healthy, I couldn't possibly need it!"
Then they get sick, they get in a car wreck, whatever and need a proceedure costing $50,000 - one they can't possibly afford - to maintain quality of life.
Had they put that $500/month aside over ten years, they'd have the money to pay for it. Of course, they haven't. They have had far cooler TVs, they've kept their cars running, maybe got nicer ones.
Instead it's suddenly a terrible crime that non life saving but critical to quality of life medical procedures cost $50,000. It doesn't matter that it costs half a million dollars plus to train each of the four doctors you want to spend hours in surgery. It doesn't matter that hospitals have to charge twice as much because they get sued by people who see it as easy money - and, indeed, if you do cobble that $50,000 together, you'll likely invent some slight to sue over, yourself, so you can get some of it back.
It gets even worse when the moron deciding $500/month is too much is a parent. On say $25k a year, that $6k/year of medical insurance is suddenly a massive chunk of their take home. They rationalize that it's better to invest the money in a nicer home for the kid, a car so they can get to a nicer school, etc., that nothing major will go wrong. Then the kid falls and they discover the life saving option is to simply remove the kids arm as it'll save their life and is far cheaper than the quality of life option that rebuilds it. Now a kid who had no part in their parent's moronic decision making is out an arm, dies of lukemia, whatever... all because the parent sucks at risk assessment.
So, in most things, sure, the government should stay out. When it comes to something their citizens are fundamentally ill equipped to make accurate calls on, then a case gets made that the people who actually crunch the numbers, rather than the ones who go off inaccurate gut feelings, should be the ones making calls... if the consequence is massive destruction of quality of life. Especially if the consequence gets to be massive destruction of someone else's quality of life.
This also goes double when people have made an equally bad call throughout their working careers about putting money aside for retirement. Should they then get a wake up call around retirement age, they've got absolutely no way of ever putting money aside for non-working years to pay those monthly premiums they've now realized are a good idea.
If the purpose of government is to provide those services we're unable or unwilling to provide for ourselves, particularly because we make bad risk assessments on large scale things we don't understand too well (military protection, police, road building, etc.), there's a great case for them if not taking over healthcare, at least making it a legal obligation we're not allowed to think we're smart enough to dodge.
Greatest game: Elite. Given how far in advance of anything else it was for its time, it pisses all over games like Doom (which I admittedly also love) for the innovation title.
Links included for reminiscing goodness at the expense of first post karma.;)
If there's one thing I find more embarrassing than gas trapped in my outskirts, it's when it causes a "devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation." It's almost impossible to blame on the dog.
Don't expect to be invited to too many parties in the 20,002,007AD-40,002,007AD season.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to the phrasing here but I noticed:
There are many aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine, and other developers could definitely improve upon my work. However, I don't know how I earn money from something once I've made it open source. Is this something that would make money on its own, with the time that's being put in to it?
Or is it at the point where it's essentially a "nice idea" that's been taken to about typical shareware quality? Something that's not even close to standing on its own as a traditional boxed product, revenue generator without a lot more development work put in by a lot more people?... People that the goal is to get for free from the Open Source movement rather than actually hire?
Back during the dotcom days, I'd get approached daily by someone new from sales or marketting within the large multi-national I was at. They heard I was a good coder and they wanted to know if I'd be willing to join their start up as the lead coder.
I'd check their business model. They always planned the same thing: Who's paying for this? "We'll get VC interest." OK, what idea do you have? "We'll find someone with a cool idea and fund it with that VC money." So you're planning on getting VCs to fund you, to do the VCs' job, with you then taking the millions dotcoms are supposed to make their owners? I don't see this working. At that point, I always politely declined.
Just as I questioned their entitlement to make money and, on a less manipulative level, their simply having deluded themselves... I'd question anyone who doesn't really have a fully featured product, that's not at a point where it can make money on its own, without needing Open Source devs to take it to the next level for them - work they won't pay for because it's "open source" but they'd still like a reasonable profit from for themselves.
Once the price gets high enough people will actually start to see the cost savings in turning down the air conditioning or better insulating their houses.
I have spent a lot of money insulating my house. When you can spend a little money, let's talk.
Your first point's a very good one. When people can save money, they'll do it.
Right now, as you point out, you end up spending a lot of money to insulate well, to use solar power, etc.
It may pay off over time but people have credit cards they'd much rather put that money to and save the 20-30% interest. Even if they don't have debt, spending thousands now to save tens of dollars on each bill is hard for a lot of people to choose to do.
And that's why hardcore energy saving remains the area of hardcore enthusiasts, people with a point to prove and those with means... not the majority of the population.
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Yes, extra resolution is a wonderful thing. IF you can see it.
Lousy upscaled DVD to lousy 1080p gives you lots more lousy pixels and a nice, reassuring feeling. Look how sharp the artificial edges of the overblown sharpening settings are now! Look how you can really get a sense of the edge of the large area that's lost in the shadows. Look how black that giant smudge is!
Or a properly calibrated set showing a DVD at its best will suddenly bring a ton of subtle detail out of the shadows, out of the blown out highlights. That mass of red cloth suddenly gains subtle variations that show the stitching, etc.
Given a choice between upping 50 near uniform red pixels to 300 near uniform red pixels or 50 near uniform red pixels to 50 beautifully varying ones, I'll always choose the latter.
So, yes, 1080p is always going to beat upscaled DVD on the same setup. But a good set, properly calibrated, vs. the majority of crap that's out there, is also always going to be a bigger improvement still.
If you have the money, get the 120hz 1080p set that's at the top of everyone's line. Plug in BluRay, marvel at the whole experience.
If you don't have the money and you have to compromise somewhere, you'll be better served by putting the price of the $500 BluRay player in to a better picture (note: I said better, not bigger) and the Avia Home Theater calibration DVD. You'll get a far bigger improvement from upconverting regular DVDs on a great set than you will from displaying a high definition source through crap.
Besides, three movies later at current costs, you'll have saved so much by buying regular DVDs, you can now buy that BluRay player anyway - and now it'll be plugged in to a great display.
The web, along with HTML, has been available since, what, '93?
They didn't file the patent until '99.
If it's that obvious, one would assume there's prior art from that six year window.
If it had been filed in say '95 when there wasn't that much interest in the web yet, that'd be one thing. By '99, a hell of a lot of people were using it and filing IPOs as fast as they could come up with ideas.
The alternative explanation would be that it wasn't all that obvious and the obviousness either comes from retrospect or misreading what the patent actually implies.
Just an observation but outrage, as often as not, comes from misunderstanding all of the details and circumstances. Sure, this is obvious and outrageous... from a short summary. Apparently it wasn't to those judging it with more information. It may be they were hoodwinked. Possibly more likely is there's more to it than a lay interpretation of a web summary.
As Joel Spolsky pointed out on his blog JoelOnSoftware, 99.999% is pretty much fictional.
99.999% over a year is 31.526 seconds.
No matter how good your staff, no matter how many people you have on site, no matter how robust your systems, no matter how many failsafes you have standing by, ready to be plugged in...
IF something does go down, even the fastest tech on earth is unlikely to identify, pull out, replace and have fired back up whatever the faulty item is in under 30 seconds.
99.999% uptime is essentially fictional. It's simply an impressive sounding number that says, "We'll do everything realistically possible to keep you up 100% of the time. In a typical year, you won't see anything bring you down. You can now tell your investors/clients this and make them feel warm and fuzzy."
It ignores the second part, "But, honestly, if it does go down, we won't have it back within 30 seconds, 100% of the time. Sorry, but welcome to reality. But, for what it's worth, our board's happy to pay you outage fees because it's a small enough risk and the amounts are capped enough, that we're happy to take the risk and costs in exchange for advertising a service we know no one can deliver."
Let's look at regulated phone service, the example in the original post. Can anyone point to a major carrier that hasn't had a major outage at some point? Be it an idiot in a switch room, a power outage affecting a whole side of the country, an anchor ripping up an undersea cable? And how many of them have actually been back within the mandated 30 seconds?
It doesn't happen. That two hour outage is going to take quarter of a millenium of absolutely no more faults to earn back at 30 seconds/year. With luck, it only hit one in 250 customers so you can pretend you're well within your 99.999% uptime but that 1 in 250 isn't really going to agree they got 99.999% after they were down for 1:59:30 more than their contract said they would be.
So, no, 99.999% doesn't exist. It's just a really cool story we tell ourselves whilst being willing to pay whatever the penalties are for missing it, on rare occasions, in exchange for great advertising.
The Air is lumbered with a 4200rpm drive.
If you're a fan of having your files emailed to you when the drive gets around to it, that's awesome. For everyone else, pretty much the only option is to upgrade to the solid state drive... at which point the price tag is massively higher.
Granted, the Acer only has a 5400rpm drive rather than an infinitely preferable 7200... and it certainly doesn't compete with the much faster solid state drive... but it's still a big step over the 4200.
Either way, the Air also comes with 2GB vs. 4GB of ram (still more than adequate right now but Moore's Law (yes, I know it's a semi-misquote) means you'll lament it well within the life of the machine).
Then again, to be fair, their only argument in favor of the Air over the Acer was that it was prettier and $60 cheaper.
This is a news producer, given access at CNN's dime, blogging about it for his own use (and potentially collecting ad revenue too).
It wouldn't be considered acceptable in any other field. A programmer releasing code to things he was exposed to on the company's time, a record label employee running a celebrity gossip paper, they'd all be facing disciplinary action. Why is a news producer any different?
It may well not be SP1.
A very large number of owners of ASUS P5N-E motherboards are reporting the same issue simply with recent updates. It's quite likely the SP1 update is simply triggering the same issue.
Here's a google search on the issue. You'll notice a common thread is that P5N-E owners have the issue, users of other motherboards don't see it.
It's been happening since mid January, from what I can gather, and I'm not finding any solutions to it yet.
From what I understand, the amount has nothing to do with the value of the laptop...
It has everything to do with a refusal to acknowledge they'd lost it, making constant excuses for a long time, followed by a refusal to pay up promptly even what it was undeniable.
It was only after she threatened to sue for the large amount that they finally got around to paying the smaller amount. Until they were in danger, they weren't in any hurry to deal with it.
There's often minimal incentive to avoid repeating the mistake if all you ever have to pay is actual physical cost, ignoring value of lost data, and you can get away with postponing making that payment, requiring endless forms of validation, follow up calls where they sit on hold for hours, etc. until they give up.
The idea of punative damages is that it's accepted that a bare minimum effort doesn't come close to being adequate and a dramatically higher cost is required to spur them in to acting in the way they knew they should have in the first place.
If BestBuy had got on and acknowledge the loss, promptly paying up, they likely wouldn't be facing this. Instead, their responding only when threatened with large punative damages, demonstrated that that's exactly what's necessary to get them to truly fulfill their obligations.
Had she asked for millions the instant they lost it, she'd get laughed out of court. That they demonstrated a complete unwillingness to address the issue until they were faced with that kind of a threat is going to get noted in a court case.
She'll unlikely see the $50m+. She'll be lucky if she sees $5m that gets reduced to $500k on appeal. But the pain of facing that, getting lawyers involved and all the rest of it is going to make an impression on BB policy for the future far more than any number of angry letters will.
It may be the medium...
Or it may be the idiots going around trying to entrap out of a sense of outraged righteousness.
There's a reason why cops aren't allowed to go up to guys on the street, hit on them, take an otherwise disinterested person and pretty much seduce him, drop in that it'll cost him, then prompty arrest him for solicitation. It's called entrapment. You're not catching criminals, you're making them where they didn't otherwise exist.
Unfortunately, as To Catch A Predator has demonstrated, vigilante groups set up, hide their own law breaking, then self congratulate whe they manage to catch people who may well never have been an issue save for their aggressive response.
Who's the real criminal here? The person who was minding their own business but slipped up when pressure sold? Or the person who does every last thing they can to inspire the crime and then self congratulates themselves for catching it?
Yes, the internet breeds paedophiles. The question is whether it's anything inherrent in the net... or if it's the by product of righteous but misguided idiots who do everything they can to entrap people.
If Nevada is such a great, efficient state then I see no reason why Microsoft shouldn't move their actual operation there, instead of just maintaining a front for tax evasion purposes.
And, as you file your own tax returns this year, I'll bet you carefully record each internet transaction from out of state, ensuring that you pay full taxes even though it would have been easy to avoid it? Of course, your charitable deductions will be paid at the lower rate you really know your junk was worth rather than the higher "standard rate" you know you can get away with? Similarly, when you realize your itemized receipts don't add up to as much as the standard deduction, you'll still take the lower amount you know you really deserve? You'll also stop using lower rate credit cards issued out of Delaware in favor of higher rate ones from your own state?
Sure, you could be saving money on your own taxes. But won't anybody think of the children in your own state who are in cramped classes because there aren't enough tax dollars. Thank God for people like you who make a point of paying every dollar they can, rather than looking for the best possible savings.
When an individual figures out ways to avoid paying taxes - or paying as little as possible - it's considered frugal. When a corporation does it, it's evil?
...Ultra-short pulses of laser light to etch nano features into the surface of metals so that they can absorb or reflect specific wavelengths of light.This is very similar to the way that butterflies get the color in their wings. And there I was thinking it had something to do with cocoons.
It's kind of like the guy at a market, selling pirated DVDs, having got raided and saying, "Just see if I stock MPAA movies now!"
To hurt someone, by taking your business away from them, you actually have to have had some intent to give them real business (as opposed to simply using unpaid copies) in the first place.
It sadly says a lot about humans that it's not exactly a high bar to reach.
I don't pay a monthly service fee to Microsoft to "permit" net access on my PC either. I bought the OS with it made pretty clear that I could reasonably expect access as part of what I'd already paid. If they sent out a forced update to all copies of XP that disabled net access in an effort to encourage users to move to Vista, I'd consider it pretty legitimate to be pissed off there too.
Apologists let them get away with selling game systems with the promise of immediate access to demos, only to then artificially delay access by a week to make the pay service more appealing. Let's not convince them that we see what remains of the Silver service that was sold as part of the initial $399 price tag as a bonus we aren't entitled to either.
If the content were available, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be stopping at 1920x1080 HD video. Monitors can already handle 2560x1600 fairly commonly and all we're waiting for is someone to come up with a way to put multi-angle video in a single steam.
What's been the limiting factor throughout? Bandwidth availability. As soon as it's available (or just becoming available), someone releases their next great idea that just hadn't taken off so far because the files were too slow to download.
Cable companies can release 100mbps lines... They can up to 1gbps, 10gbp, 100gbps... And we'll come up with cool ways to use them.
That's not to imply they shouldn't invest in new technologies and keep moving forward... but "just give people more" isn't a real solution either. That more will never be enough and you'll be back in the same position.
Realizing I'm going to be mocked as the "the intertubes are a series of roads" guy... It does have a lot of parallels to the road construction argument.
To many people, most even, the answer's simple: If there's congestion, build more and bigger roads.
The thing is, all the research demonstrates that people will drive up to a given pain threshold. You reduce the amount of pain they feel... they drive more until they're back up to it. You spend a whole load of money, destroy the environment, and everyone complains just as much about how sucky traffic is.
Of course, refuse to build more roads and you very quickly get voted out of office by angry commuters who "know" the system far better than any researchers with their numbers ever could. On the internets, we call them discussion boards.
I've just signed up for fiber optic to the home. My TV signal is now getting delivered over my internet connection as IPTV - which should free up the TV spectrum to deliver internet - which I can then get IPTV on.
I think my head hurts. But I'm pretty sure we invented perpetual motion somewhere in there.
Sadly, it's the case that humans tend to suck massively at risk assessment.
"I'm young, I'm sure as hell not going to pay $500/month for health insurance. I'm too healthy, I couldn't possibly need it!"
Then they get sick, they get in a car wreck, whatever and need a proceedure costing $50,000 - one they can't possibly afford - to maintain quality of life.
Had they put that $500/month aside over ten years, they'd have the money to pay for it. Of course, they haven't. They have had far cooler TVs, they've kept their cars running, maybe got nicer ones.
Instead it's suddenly a terrible crime that non life saving but critical to quality of life medical procedures cost $50,000. It doesn't matter that it costs half a million dollars plus to train each of the four doctors you want to spend hours in surgery. It doesn't matter that hospitals have to charge twice as much because they get sued by people who see it as easy money - and, indeed, if you do cobble that $50,000 together, you'll likely invent some slight to sue over, yourself, so you can get some of it back.
It gets even worse when the moron deciding $500/month is too much is a parent. On say $25k a year, that $6k/year of medical insurance is suddenly a massive chunk of their take home. They rationalize that it's better to invest the money in a nicer home for the kid, a car so they can get to a nicer school, etc., that nothing major will go wrong. Then the kid falls and they discover the life saving option is to simply remove the kids arm as it'll save their life and is far cheaper than the quality of life option that rebuilds it. Now a kid who had no part in their parent's moronic decision making is out an arm, dies of lukemia, whatever... all because the parent sucks at risk assessment.
So, in most things, sure, the government should stay out. When it comes to something their citizens are fundamentally ill equipped to make accurate calls on, then a case gets made that the people who actually crunch the numbers, rather than the ones who go off inaccurate gut feelings, should be the ones making calls... if the consequence is massive destruction of quality of life. Especially if the consequence gets to be massive destruction of someone else's quality of life.
This also goes double when people have made an equally bad call throughout their working careers about putting money aside for retirement. Should they then get a wake up call around retirement age, they've got absolutely no way of ever putting money aside for non-working years to pay those monthly premiums they've now realized are a good idea.
If the purpose of government is to provide those services we're unable or unwilling to provide for ourselves, particularly because we make bad risk assessments on large scale things we don't understand too well (military protection, police, road building, etc.), there's a great case for them if not taking over healthcare, at least making it a legal obligation we're not allowed to think we're smart enough to dodge.
He could however compete in the Paralympics which are geared towards physical disabilities such as amputees or blind people.
Except the guys in wheelchairs have an unfair advantage over him thanks to their wheels.
He only wants to compete against able bodied atheletes against whom his blades are no advantage at all, honest!
This really screws up my plans to enter the high jump on a pogo stick.
The Gaming Industry Association of America should be referred to as:
"GIAA" or, in gamerspeak, "Teh geyer!"
Hmm. Perhaps we may want to rethink that one.
Links included for reminiscing goodness at the expense of first post karma.
...Get impeached.
If there's one thing I find more embarrassing than gas trapped in my outskirts, it's when it causes a "devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation." It's almost impossible to blame on the dog.
Don't expect to be invited to too many parties in the 20,002,007AD-40,002,007AD season.
Or is it at the point where it's essentially a "nice idea" that's been taken to about typical shareware quality? Something that's not even close to standing on its own as a traditional boxed product, revenue generator without a lot more development work put in by a lot more people?... People that the goal is to get for free from the Open Source movement rather than actually hire?
Back during the dotcom days, I'd get approached daily by someone new from sales or marketting within the large multi-national I was at. They heard I was a good coder and they wanted to know if I'd be willing to join their start up as the lead coder.
I'd check their business model. They always planned the same thing: Who's paying for this? "We'll get VC interest." OK, what idea do you have? "We'll find someone with a cool idea and fund it with that VC money." So you're planning on getting VCs to fund you, to do the VCs' job, with you then taking the millions dotcoms are supposed to make their owners? I don't see this working. At that point, I always politely declined.
Just as I questioned their entitlement to make money and, on a less manipulative level, their simply having deluded themselves... I'd question anyone who doesn't really have a fully featured product, that's not at a point where it can make money on its own, without needing Open Source devs to take it to the next level for them - work they won't pay for because it's "open source" but they'd still like a reasonable profit from for themselves.
I have spent a lot of money insulating my house. When you can spend a little money, let's talk.
Your first point's a very good one. When people can save money, they'll do it.
Right now, as you point out, you end up spending a lot of money to insulate well, to use solar power, etc.
It may pay off over time but people have credit cards they'd much rather put that money to and save the 20-30% interest. Even if they don't have debt, spending thousands now to save tens of dollars on each bill is hard for a lot of people to choose to do.
And that's why hardcore energy saving remains the area of hardcore enthusiasts, people with a point to prove and those with means... not the majority of the population.