"The problem with any peak time storage based system (which the discussion got to by power companies forcing people onto the peak/offpeak rates) is if it gets sufficiently viable to store power when its cheap everyone will start doing it and then the peak/off peak will average out"
That is not a problem, that is a good thing. During heavy use times in CA, the peak usage during the day is like twice the minimum usage at night. This means plants are starting up and shutting down every day to match the usage pattern, and 50% more power plants are needed than if the usage were even. Constant usage rate should result in cheaper power for everyone.
It would be great if appliances were smarter, and instead of a brownout we could have everybody's air conditioning and hot water heater turn themselves to a lower setting when the system is overloaded. I don't see that this could happen in our lifetimes.
Arguing with the armchair physicists on slashdot is about as productive arguing with armchair physicists on usenet was 15 years ago. I think the claim that the efficiency was over 100% is what set them off. It was too much to hope that they would think for 5 minutes to understand what you are saying.
It is clear that your system works best when the daytime temperature outside is warmer then desirable room temperature. I am not sure what happens if the outside temperature is 10 degrees F. How does the efficiency of the turbines depend on the discharge environment? (You don't want to pump cold air into a heated house in the winter, so the turbines will have to discharge into 10 F.) Anyway, the cold air output provides no benefit, so you lose somewhat in your "efficiency" there. Maybe the insolation in winter is so low that it doesn't matter.
Err... why not? I plan on buying one in a few days.
The "[Lenovo recommended]" mark is next to XP, not Vista. I assume if the website lets me choose XP instead of Vista, that is what they will actually send.
What closing down the Stable/Unstable branches "so everyone becomes a tester" really means is: everyone gets Unstable.
Hardly.
First, anyone running "an important server" on hardware that doesn't have a history of stable support is incompetent.
Second, anyone wanting a thoroughly tested kernel (with security patches backported) should be running one from a commercial distribution. That is what they are for.
It is ludicrous to say "everyone becomes a tester." It is reasonable to say, "everyone who downloads and runs the newest kernel from kernel.org the first day it is released becomes a tester." That has always been true even for the stable branches anyway.
"Analogies aren't meant to be perfect, they are meant to be demonstrative of similar principles."
But in this case, there are no similar principles that matter. There are specific laws that determine copyright ownership when you pay someone to perform work for you. There are no specific laws that cover the situation of someone entering a contest on company time. The two cases are not analogous. There are no general principles that apply to both situations. That is not a "trivial detail."
"but you will note that first entry is exactly the case as spelled out in the OP's post that you are disputing as being relevant."
No, you are misreading what you quoted. It doesn't matter whether a specific task is under direct control by the employer. It matters whether the work in general of the person is directed by the employer. The material you quoted is not used to determine whether a created work is a work for hire; it determines whether someone is an employee or not. There is no question that the trooper is an employee.
I don't think the key word is "scope." The key word is "employee." Work for hire is an issue when someone is working as a contractor rather than an employee. For example, if you get a professional photographer to take pictures of your company headquarters, the company does not own the photos without a specific agreement. I am a regular employee, so my employer owns any photos I take on company time, even though it does not show up in my job description (if I had a job description). If he has a job description, it probably includes something like "and other duties as assigned." He cannot argue that he works as a self-employed programmer higher as a contractor to perform this specific programming task, so the work for hire issue is dead.
It is too bad that this gentlemen did not worry about ownership issues earlier, before he muddied the issue by using his employer's resources.
"Here's a demonstration that Cisco was continuously using the trademark:"
Seems iffy. After all, lots of places offer Linux support, but that does not give them rights to the name Linux. The mere mention of the mark iPhone in describing the service is not the same as using it as the name of a product or service. This is like the difference between an automobile company selling Fords and a garage advertising that they fix Fords.
When the mark is registered, the product also has to be specified. The original mark was presumably applied to the physical phone. That object has not been available for sale throughout the required period. Using "iPhone" in the description of service is not the same as having "iPhone" as part of the trademarked name of a service.
Have you considered downloading a live CD and trying it out? That way you can have a machine to experiment on without having to purchase any hardware (or deal with the headaches of setting up a dual boot machine). Your coworkers can play around with it as well, and you can reboot into Windows whenever you need the machine for something else. People can also take copies of the disk home to use there if they have little spare time.
On another note, it is my experience that local LUGs (Linux User Group) are more helpful to new users and more patient than large discussion boards like/. Try googling on LUG plus the name of your city.
It is worth noting that Linux runs well on hardware that would shock a Windows user. A machine purchased for Windows 95 can run a modern Linux distro. Unfortunately, it does take more than a beginner's knowledge to know what not to run (Java, mozilla, metacity) and what to run (twm, dillo). You may be able to find an unused computer (or get someone to donate one) which is out of date and useless for Windows, and get someone from the local LUG to set it up with a usable installation of a Linux distro for you.
"then take them to court. put up or shut up already."
That is just brilliant. Who ever would have thought of it? If I don't like something being done by a company that can spend $10B on lawyers and not even notice it's gone, I should go to court on my own dime and sue them.
I am sure that with all the free legal advice I can get on the internet I should have no trouble mopping the floor with them. As long as my heart is pure, I will prevail.
Your summary is interesting, and raises more questions than it answers.
You need to go through a lot of math to understand if the confinement works. It is easy to make a confinement system work in the first approximation. Then you have to consider all the higher order effects due to field curvature etc. and prove that these are either slow or cancel out. Is this true for his geometry?
Insulation is a red herring. A plasma is a good conductor, and charge will move around and create large currents and electric fields wherever it can. The point made elsewhere that "we know how to make high voltage standoffs" is likewise not really true, because the electric field that can be sustained across a gap depends on the gas and plasma density, and is a lot lower in those conditions than at 1 atm of air.
What ion temperature did he achieve? Until you get to an ion temperature of a few hundred eV, most of the power will be lost to atomic radiation. Until you "burn through" this limit, you do not have a serious contender for a fusion experiment.
"JET is even older than I am, and has already achieved fusion."
Let's be precise. There are several milestones of interest. The first is producing more fusion power than the amount of external power put in. JET very nearly did this. To calculate this properly, you have to include the change in stored energy in the plasma, and with this correction they just missed the mark, as I recall. Could other similar machines do this? No one knows! No other facility currently operating can handle the radiation levels produced, so they do not even attempt it. Instead, they study plasmas of deuterium and hydrogen rather than the deuterium-tritium mix that maximizes the fusion output.
The next big milestone is a self-sustaining plasma. That is, one in which enough of the fusion power is captured to heat the plasma and keep it going. This requires a much larger machine, because getting the energy from the energetic alphas produced by the fusion reactions is hard. ITER should (fingers crossed) achieve this.
The next milestone is a self-sustaining plasma that can be used for energy production.
There is a tricky issue here. How expensive is oil? Looking at the price of gasoline or the cents per megawatt-hour on your electricity bill doesn't tell you. The reason is that there are many costs that are paid indirectly or paid by all of us. First (and I only wish to tread lightly on this one) is the expense incurred trying to maintain political stability in the Middle East while swamping corrupt goverments with oil money. Then there is pollution of the air and water and the longterm effects of CO2 emission. Even trivial things like oil tankers using public roads. Now incorporate all these things into the price of oil. Is it still cheaper than fusion?
I have no idea, but that is the right question to ask.
"Especially when traditional fusion research has been promising results in 20 years for upwards of 40 years."
No one ever promised that traditional fusion research would succeed in 40 years without funding. The amount of money going into fusion research in the US has been dropping for the last 30 years (in constant dollars). And yet as experiments become more sophisticated, they become more expensive to build and operate.
If Bussard's next level experiment would cost $200M, it would be the most expensive fusion research facility in the US.
"No, copyright is about making money distributing copies."
Not at all. Copyright prohibits me from giving away free copies of a piece of software that I just bought. In only a small set of cases does legality hinge on whether I make money on the distribution.
"Making a backup copy of a copyrighted work is completely legal and is explicitly spelled out in copyright law."
No, making a backup copy of software is explicitly allowed.
Whether or not you have logic on your side, decisions in these grey areas have to be made by the courts. Until they are, we have no idea what the law is.
"How can you explain the recent same climate changes on different planets?"
Experts apparently do not think the climate changes are related. Here is one example.
So, in terms of a straightforward link between the two, an association between the Sun and Earth, it looks like the Sun has not been the cause of most of the late 20th Century warming. It could have made a contribution.
Has not been the cause.
There are tremendous difficulties when one is studying a system that cannot be broken into components and cannot be tested experimentally. Every result should be assessed skeptically.
One issue is what effects of global warming will harm us in the end.
Another issue is what measurements are most sensitive and reliable at capturing early indications of long-term climate change.
As has been amply pointed out, the measurements at any one ground location today are not outside of total historical variation. You cannot learn much from that.
The different aspects of the global climate interlock to form a chaotic, self-organized system. Chaotic means that tiny variations in one part of the system today can have large effects on the state of the system in the future (the system is not equally sensitive to all variation - some changes are magnified and others damp out). Things like atmospheric temperatures or deep ocean temperatures are part of the system, and you have to know what is going on there to understand what is happening to the system as a whole.
To pick a simple example, hurricanes are driven by the difference between the water temperature and the air temperature out in the ocean. A few degrees difference in the ocean temperature is the difference between a quiet storm season and record winds and rainfall.
Self-organized means that the different things driving the system combine in complicated ways to create the effects. What if an early effect of global warming is to triple the rainfall on the US east coast, or reduce the rainfall over most of Africa by 75%, or reverse the direction of the Gulf Stream? All of these things would be far more disasterous than an increase of a few degrees in average surface temperature.
I suspect the problem is a lot more complicated than you think. It might be so complicated that all the models are wrong. Maybe the models are right that problems are coming, but wrong about how they will manifest. Who can say?
"The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming,"
Really? Let's look at the Wikipedia pages, as you suggest. "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of unusually warm climate in Europe,"
Whoa. Wait a minute. What were those last two words? "in Europe" So anyone can read Monckton's article, do a little outside reading, and see that he is trying to argue that local climate variation disproves claims of global warming. Does that mean his conclusions must be wrong? Of course not. But, by golly, it sure sounds like he is more concerned about convincing his readers than he is about creating a valid argument.
"Between you and me, that's not enough. 6,000 isn't enough, IMO."
Red herring. Not important at all. What is more important is the temperatures not measured by the land-based weather stations, things like ocean temperatures, high altitude atmospheric temperatures. A small number of measurements in the right places would be far more valuable than lots of measurements in the wrong places.
A better question is if improvements have been made in other measurements, like from satellites.
I might believe you if you didn't contradict yourself:
For the legit user, it's not a problem.
One real issue that vendors need to address is 24/7 availability of support staff so that legit users can get new license keys if a machine dies after hours or on the weekend.
The second sentence means that activation is a problem for legitimate users.
You are also making assumptions that are not necessarily valid, e.g. that all machines have internet access.
You are also looking at this in the context of single-purpose workstations. It is one thing to get a new key for one program, but what if you have to get twenty or thirty new keys? I don't know what your Real Work is, but my Real Work does not involve spending all day on the phone with software vendors.
You are also ignoring the issue of what happens if the company ceases to exist or stops supporting its software. Then it becomes a problem for legitimate users.
"Once again, some Slashdot users prove that their hatred towards Microsoft surpasses objectivity."
Who else would bother to read a story like "News flash! QA team finds bug in prerelease software" ?
The summary makes it clear that no actual information is known except for a short schedule slip. Why would I even be looking at the comments except to read people bashing "M$"? (Scare quotes to aid the irony impaired.)
My old HP printer used as much power turned off as it did turned on and waiting. I took to unplugging it. I guess this arises from using an inefficient transformer and putting the power switch on the low voltage side.
My main problem with the wattmeter gizmo is that I could not use it on the items that I guessed were using a large percentage of the power, namely dishwasher, hot water heater, and dryer. Either the items did not run on 117 VAC or they were wired directly without a plug.
"I cannot take credit for the discovery of the inverse demand curve"
The question is not whether this phenomenon exists, as it has been proven to. The question is where on the curve the ipod is.
In other words, what price should something have before the "Too cheap, it must be junk" thought starts appearing? I don't think a $200 mp3 player would be perceived as junk. Consider $60 DVD players, $300 desktop computers, and what do cell phones cost these days? (not counting the hidden costs, because the apparent cost is what matters.) Based on (obviously unfair) comparisons to products that would appear to the technically naive as equivalently complex, I would put the "Must be junk" price under $100.
You're right that the concept of "overpriced" needs a definition. Overpriced compared to other mp3 players? Overpriced compared to other similar electronic devices? Overpriced compared to the utility to be gained? Overpriced compared to what the company could charge and still make a small profit? I don't think ipods are overpriced compared to other available mp3 players, or I wouldn't be using one right now. On the other hand, I suspect that Apple could sell them for a lot less and still make a profit.
"most people don't think that paying an extra $20 or so to get a "real" iPod is that big of a deal."
That's the point. If a Zune is $20 less than an ipod, will people buy it, and what will motivate them to do so? Just saving $20 isn't enough.
It's like wine. People look at all of the bottles on the shelf and don't have any idea what the difference is, but their pretty sure that the $40 bottle is better than the $6 bottle, even though that isn't really true at all.
I think that there are a few reasons that your analogy does not apply. First, I can't taste the wine in the store before you buy it, while I can try out mp3 players. Second, there are hundreds or thousands of different types of wine in a store. I cannot read reviews of a thousand different kinds of wine to pick a bottle at the store, but I can read an article that discusses the top two or three mp3 players.
The conventional wisdom is that ipods are overpriced but have a great interface and good sound quality (I am not asserting the truth or falsity of this statement). It is hard to imagine a MS product having a great user interface, so why would I consider it unless it is substantially cheaper than an ipod?
"simple graphics are far more persuasive than watching text scroll down."
I agree with you, but I have nothing to back this up except intuition.
But it should be possible to write a python class wrapping around a gtk widget or whatever that would provide an interface pretty much identical to the old basic drawing commands. s=Screen(), s.line(0,0,1,1), s.box(10,20,10,40), or whatever they were.
That is my first thought about what might make python a starter language for kids. Another thing might be to emulate the old sound facilities in MS basic.
I am not sure whether the gotchas in python would be too confusing for young learners (e.g. the difference between a=b and a=b[:]), or whether they would never be hit.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not a problem, that is a good thing. During heavy use times in CA, the peak usage during the day is like twice the minimum usage at night. This means plants are starting up and shutting down every day to match the usage pattern, and 50% more power plants are needed than if the usage were even. Constant usage rate should result in cheaper power for everyone.
It would be great if appliances were smarter, and instead of a brownout we could have everybody's air conditioning and hot water heater turn themselves to a lower setting when the system is overloaded. I don't see that this could happen in our lifetimes.
Arguing with the armchair physicists on slashdot is about as productive arguing with armchair physicists on usenet was 15 years ago. I think the claim that the efficiency was over 100% is what set them off. It was too much to hope that they would think for 5 minutes to understand what you are saying.
It is clear that your system works best when the daytime temperature outside is warmer then desirable room temperature. I am not sure what happens if the outside temperature is 10 degrees F. How does the efficiency of the turbines depend on the discharge environment? (You don't want to pump cold air into a heated house in the winter, so the turbines will have to discharge into 10 F.) Anyway, the cold air output provides no benefit, so you lose somewhat in your "efficiency" there. Maybe the insolation in winter is so low that it doesn't matter.
Err... why not? I plan on buying one in a few days.
The "[Lenovo recommended]" mark is next to XP, not Vista. I assume if the website lets me choose XP instead of Vista, that is what they will actually send.
First, anyone running "an important server" on hardware that doesn't have a history of stable support is incompetent.
Second, anyone wanting a thoroughly tested kernel (with security patches backported) should be running one from a commercial distribution. That is what they are for.
It is ludicrous to say "everyone becomes a tester." It is reasonable to say, "everyone who downloads and runs the newest kernel from kernel.org the first day it is released becomes a tester." That has always been true even for the stable branches anyway.
But in this case, there are no similar principles that matter. There are specific laws that determine copyright ownership when you pay someone to perform work for you. There are no specific laws that cover the situation of someone entering a contest on company time. The two cases are not analogous. There are no general principles that apply to both situations. That is not a "trivial detail."
And this has what to do with copyright law?
"but you will note that first entry is exactly the case as spelled out in the OP's post that you are disputing as being relevant." No, you are misreading what you quoted. It doesn't matter whether a specific task is under direct control by the employer. It matters whether the work in general of the person is directed by the employer. The material you quoted is not used to determine whether a created work is a work for hire; it determines whether someone is an employee or not. There is no question that the trooper is an employee.
It is too bad that this gentlemen did not worry about ownership issues earlier, before he muddied the issue by using his employer's resources.
Seems iffy. After all, lots of places offer Linux support, but that does not give them rights to the name Linux. The mere mention of the mark iPhone in describing the service is not the same as using it as the name of a product or service. This is like the difference between an automobile company selling Fords and a garage advertising that they fix Fords.
When the mark is registered, the product also has to be specified. The original mark was presumably applied to the physical phone. That object has not been available for sale throughout the required period. Using "iPhone" in the description of service is not the same as having "iPhone" as part of the trademarked name of a service.
Have you considered downloading a live CD and trying it out? That way you can have a machine to experiment on without having to purchase any hardware (or deal with the headaches of setting up a dual boot machine). Your coworkers can play around with it as well, and you can reboot into Windows whenever you need the machine for something else. People can also take copies of the disk home to use there if they have little spare time.
On another note, it is my experience that local LUGs (Linux User Group) are more helpful to new users and more patient than large discussion boards like /. Try googling on LUG plus the name of your city.
It is worth noting that Linux runs well on hardware that would shock a Windows user. A machine purchased for Windows 95 can run a modern Linux distro. Unfortunately, it does take more than a beginner's knowledge to know what not to run (Java, mozilla, metacity) and what to run (twm, dillo). You may be able to find an unused computer (or get someone to donate one) which is out of date and useless for Windows, and get someone from the local LUG to set it up with a usable installation of a Linux distro for you.
Good luck.
That is just brilliant. Who ever would have thought of it? If I don't like something being done by a company that can spend $10B on lawyers and not even notice it's gone, I should go to court on my own dime and sue them.
I am sure that with all the free legal advice I can get on the internet I should have no trouble mopping the floor with them. As long as my heart is pure, I will prevail.
You need to go through a lot of math to understand if the confinement works. It is easy to make a confinement system work in the first approximation. Then you have to consider all the higher order effects due to field curvature etc. and prove that these are either slow or cancel out. Is this true for his geometry?
Insulation is a red herring. A plasma is a good conductor, and charge will move around and create large currents and electric fields wherever it can. The point made elsewhere that "we know how to make high voltage standoffs" is likewise not really true, because the electric field that can be sustained across a gap depends on the gas and plasma density, and is a lot lower in those conditions than at 1 atm of air.
What ion temperature did he achieve? Until you get to an ion temperature of a few hundred eV, most of the power will be lost to atomic radiation. Until you "burn through" this limit, you do not have a serious contender for a fusion experiment.
Let's be precise. There are several milestones of interest. The first is producing more fusion power than the amount of external power put in. JET very nearly did this. To calculate this properly, you have to include the change in stored energy in the plasma, and with this correction they just missed the mark, as I recall. Could other similar machines do this? No one knows! No other facility currently operating can handle the radiation levels produced, so they do not even attempt it. Instead, they study plasmas of deuterium and hydrogen rather than the deuterium-tritium mix that maximizes the fusion output.
The next big milestone is a self-sustaining plasma. That is, one in which enough of the fusion power is captured to heat the plasma and keep it going. This requires a much larger machine, because getting the energy from the energetic alphas produced by the fusion reactions is hard. ITER should (fingers crossed) achieve this.
The next milestone is a self-sustaining plasma that can be used for energy production.
There is a tricky issue here. How expensive is oil? Looking at the price of gasoline or the cents per megawatt-hour on your electricity bill doesn't tell you. The reason is that there are many costs that are paid indirectly or paid by all of us. First (and I only wish to tread lightly on this one) is the expense incurred trying to maintain political stability in the Middle East while swamping corrupt goverments with oil money. Then there is pollution of the air and water and the longterm effects of CO2 emission. Even trivial things like oil tankers using public roads. Now incorporate all these things into the price of oil. Is it still cheaper than fusion?
I have no idea, but that is the right question to ask.
No one ever promised that traditional fusion research would succeed in 40 years without funding. The amount of money going into fusion research in the US has been dropping for the last 30 years (in constant dollars). And yet as experiments become more sophisticated, they become more expensive to build and operate.
If Bussard's next level experiment would cost $200M, it would be the most expensive fusion research facility in the US.
Not at all. Copyright prohibits me from giving away free copies of a piece of software that I just bought. In only a small set of cases does legality hinge on whether I make money on the distribution.
"Making a backup copy of a copyrighted work is completely legal and is explicitly spelled out in copyright law."
No, making a backup copy of software is explicitly allowed.
Whether or not you have logic on your side, decisions in these grey areas have to be made by the courts. Until they are, we have no idea what the law is.
Experts apparently do not think the climate changes are related. Here is one example.
Has not been the cause.There are tremendous difficulties when one is studying a system that cannot be broken into components and cannot be tested experimentally. Every result should be assessed skeptically.
You are confusing two different things.
One issue is what effects of global warming will harm us in the end.
Another issue is what measurements are most sensitive and reliable at capturing early indications of long-term climate change.
As has been amply pointed out, the measurements at any one ground location today are not outside of total historical variation. You cannot learn much from that.
The different aspects of the global climate interlock to form a chaotic, self-organized system. Chaotic means that tiny variations in one part of the system today can have large effects on the state of the system in the future (the system is not equally sensitive to all variation - some changes are magnified and others damp out). Things like atmospheric temperatures or deep ocean temperatures are part of the system, and you have to know what is going on there to understand what is happening to the system as a whole.
To pick a simple example, hurricanes are driven by the difference between the water temperature and the air temperature out in the ocean. A few degrees difference in the ocean temperature is the difference between a quiet storm season and record winds and rainfall.
Self-organized means that the different things driving the system combine in complicated ways to create the effects. What if an early effect of global warming is to triple the rainfall on the US east coast, or reduce the rainfall over most of Africa by 75%, or reverse the direction of the Gulf Stream? All of these things would be far more disasterous than an increase of a few degrees in average surface temperature.
I suspect the problem is a lot more complicated than you think. It might be so complicated that all the models are wrong. Maybe the models are right that problems are coming, but wrong about how they will manifest. Who can say?
Really? Let's look at the Wikipedia pages, as you suggest. "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of unusually warm climate in Europe,"
Whoa. Wait a minute. What were those last two words? "in Europe" So anyone can read Monckton's article, do a little outside reading, and see that he is trying to argue that local climate variation disproves claims of global warming. Does that mean his conclusions must be wrong? Of course not. But, by golly, it sure sounds like he is more concerned about convincing his readers than he is about creating a valid argument.
Red herring. Not important at all. What is more important is the temperatures not measured by the land-based weather stations, things like ocean temperatures, high altitude atmospheric temperatures. A small number of measurements in the right places would be far more valuable than lots of measurements in the wrong places.
A better question is if improvements have been made in other measurements, like from satellites.
You are also making assumptions that are not necessarily valid, e.g. that all machines have internet access.
You are also looking at this in the context of single-purpose workstations. It is one thing to get a new key for one program, but what if you have to get twenty or thirty new keys? I don't know what your Real Work is, but my Real Work does not involve spending all day on the phone with software vendors.
You are also ignoring the issue of what happens if the company ceases to exist or stops supporting its software. Then it becomes a problem for legitimate users.
Who else would bother to read a story like "News flash! QA team finds bug in prerelease software" ?
The summary makes it clear that no actual information is known except for a short schedule slip. Why would I even be looking at the comments except to read people bashing "M$"? (Scare quotes to aid the irony impaired.)
My main problem with the wattmeter gizmo is that I could not use it on the items that I guessed were using a large percentage of the power, namely dishwasher, hot water heater, and dryer. Either the items did not run on 117 VAC or they were wired directly without a plug.
The question is not whether this phenomenon exists, as it has been proven to. The question is where on the curve the ipod is.
In other words, what price should something have before the "Too cheap, it must be junk" thought starts appearing? I don't think a $200 mp3 player would be perceived as junk. Consider $60 DVD players, $300 desktop computers, and what do cell phones cost these days? (not counting the hidden costs, because the apparent cost is what matters.) Based on (obviously unfair) comparisons to products that would appear to the technically naive as equivalently complex, I would put the "Must be junk" price under $100.
You're right that the concept of "overpriced" needs a definition. Overpriced compared to other mp3 players? Overpriced compared to other similar electronic devices? Overpriced compared to the utility to be gained? Overpriced compared to what the company could charge and still make a small profit? I don't think ipods are overpriced compared to other available mp3 players, or I wouldn't be using one right now. On the other hand, I suspect that Apple could sell them for a lot less and still make a profit.
"most people don't think that paying an extra $20 or so to get a "real" iPod is that big of a deal."
That's the point. If a Zune is $20 less than an ipod, will people buy it, and what will motivate them to do so? Just saving $20 isn't enough.
The conventional wisdom is that ipods are overpriced but have a great interface and good sound quality (I am not asserting the truth or falsity of this statement). It is hard to imagine a MS product having a great user interface, so why would I consider it unless it is substantially cheaper than an ipod?
I agree with you, but I have nothing to back this up except intuition.
But it should be possible to write a python class wrapping around a gtk widget or whatever that would provide an interface pretty much identical to the old basic drawing commands. s=Screen(), s.line(0,0,1,1), s.box(10,20,10,40), or whatever they were.
That is my first thought about what might make python a starter language for kids. Another thing might be to emulate the old sound facilities in MS basic.
I am not sure whether the gotchas in python would be too confusing for young learners (e.g. the difference between a=b and a=b[:]), or whether they would never be hit.