For a change, I need to agree with Sony (and you) on this one. Whether or not this infringes on "NC" really depends on exactly what they've done with it.
Do they simply display it in a browser-like interface, while preserving the essential webpageyness of the content? If so, I'd call that no more "noncommercial" than using Internet Explorer on Windows to visit Wikia directly. If, however, they've completely butchered the content to fit their marketing department's retarded whims and removed any traces of attribution in the process, that clearly goes well beyond grey area.
We've already accepted that every TV will eventually function as a more-or-less fully capable streaming media center; we also need to accept the implications of that on exactly the present issue. If device-X has a web browser, does device-X need a special license to view any webpage not explicitly marked as free-for-all? And if so, why doesn't MSIE need the same license? What if the TV runs Win8 and actually displays the content in MSIE?
4 million lines of code isn't too far from 500 million? Math is not your strong suit is it.
Not defending what the GP said, but in context, 4 million lines of code sounds just about as reasonable as 500 million. Have any of you visited healthcare.gov? I've personally written substantially more complex websites pulling from multiple datasources (including the backend SQL code and a pair of webservices), and I doubt I have 10k lines between them all total. And yes, that includes comments, and no, I don't write single line multi-megabyte Perl scripts.
The only serious complexity to healthcare.gov comes from getting reliable price feeds from the insurance companies - And that amounts to more of a business problem than a coding one. So when anyone comes out and tells me that PoC (no, not "proof of concept") has X million lines of code, my bullshit detector pegs the meter.
How is "geek culture has a problem with encouraging, or at the very least ignoring, misogyny" the same as saying "pla is a rapist"
Maybe the part where he called a complete psycho's manifesto against humanity (including women) "a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto", and backstepped just a hair to exclude the actual mass murdering part?
That thing reads like TimeCube, and the only difference TFA saw between its author and "a standard frustrated angry geeky guy" involves actually going out and killing people? And you don't see that as maybe just the teensiest bit prejudiced against "standard frustrated angry geeky guy"s?
Go fuck yourself. Seriously. You count as worse than those you accuse, because you at least recognize the existence of a bigger picture, then deliberately ignore it on one side of your equation to get the result you want.
You would paint all of geek culture with the same misogynistic brush... Are all Arabs radical jihadis? Do all women suck at sports? Do all Jews drink the blood of unbaptized Christian babies? Do all blacks rock at sports?
Free hint - When geeks / men / whites / middle-class / $majority_group_x push back against this sort of bullshit, we don't do it because we disagree with your fundamental premise; we do it because you accuse us, you accuse me of doing what you describe, solely for my membership in an extremely loosely defined social grouping, and you don't know a thing about me.
You'll have much better luck trying to make friends among those who agree with you (aside from your "socially acceptable prejudice") than by alienating 99% of the group most able to assist you in your long-term goals, right out of the gate.
...Complete with shameless plugs to his last few blog posts. Funny, some sites actually ban you for pulling shit like that, even in the discussion* itself. Slashdot makes it an FP.
Pathetic.
* Personally I think that goes too far, on any site with even halfway functional moderation; but can we maybe at least keep the FP content on-topic?
I'm not sure I follow. If antennas are the most likely thing to be struck by lightning in their immediate area, in what sense don't they "attract lightning"?
You could just as well have a grounded ferret cage connected to the antenna, and it would have the same effect.
Perhaps you've never heard the torturous "logic" people use to justify the TV-attracts-lightning myth, and didn't get the reference... Let me give you a good laugh, friend - Basically, it goes something along the lines of "I have a friend of a friend whose engineer husband says TVs work on just the right frequency that they actually pull in all the lightning for miles around"... Then ask them if they still unplug their LCD TV, now that CRTs have become a historical curiosity. Another common variation runs that somehow, TVs count as especially vulnerable to "exploding" when struck by lightning (as opposed to everything else that explodes when struck by lightning - Trees, microwave ovens, ferrets...
Everything requires some amount of faith. If nothing else, we must have faith that things outside of our own thoughts exist and logic will continue to work as we know it from one moment to the next.
Solipsism doesn't make for a very good working hypothesis, nor does the denial of it take "faith". I have zero "faith" that the external world will continue to exist long enough for me to submit this post - I just don't even waste the CPU time giving the concept a second thought (stoned mental diarrhea aside - And that still doesn't involve any more "faith" than pondering the physics behind Santa's annual trip, or whether Jerry Garcia could have taken his own weight in acid over his lifetime).
Unfortunately, there is no escaping a little faith in order to keep on functioning as a sane, cogent being.
Not giving something mental air-time doesn't require you to believe the opposite. As a good example, I consider the existence of extraterrestrial life as highly probable, statistically. That said, the kooks you see promoting modern UFO culture, I hold in such high esteem as all the other unmedicated psychotics you see arguing with themselves while waiting for the bus.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
You can still "believe" in true things. I fully expect the average Joe's belief in how electricity makes their lights work as substantially similar to belief in $Deity - They have no clue at all about the underlying principles at work, and just blindly repeat the same things their parents did out of indoctrinated habit.
Ask ten random people whether TVs "attract" lightning (as opposed to your antenna simply counting as the highest good conductor in the immediate area), and you'll probably weep for humanity at how many of them say "yes".
What an amazingly stupid TFA... In what world does belief in anything have scientific literacy as a prerequisite?
A person can "believe" in evolution or general relativity or the Higgs boson the same way they can believe in Zeus or Jesus or the Easter Bunny. In the former set of cases, they hold true beliefs entirely by coincidence, with no more solid basis than those who adhere to the latter set.
The difference between the two domains of belief comes from the demonstrability of the former as viable hypotheses, not yet disproven (or more accurately, "not yet rejected for the null hypothesis") by experiment. The latter have pretty much exhaustively had all but the most untestable of their predictions thoroughly trounced. And where science grows as the gaps shrink, well, the gaps necessarily shrink.
So where do I download the optimized Bitcoin miner for these demos, and does anyone have a few thousand throwaway email addresses I can borrow for 24 hours?
And as it turns out, much of the job of new CompSci grads involves killing application systems and designing database entry screens.
Support has always counted as one of the biggest PITAs in software engineering. Reducing that to something we can handle server side has made a world of difference to how much it sucks to take a nice clean app and actually give it to (ugh!) users.
Now, I'll agree data-entry front-ends have very little glamor to them. But keep in mind, someone gets to write the back-end code - Data entry doesn't accomplish much if you don't do something with the data.
no. the idea of an autonomous vehicle with no possible driver to override it is just plain stupid.
You realize that as soon as we really do have autonomous cars, the adult drivers will become just as useless as a 12YO heading for the mall? Pretending anything else will happen, that somehow an adult "driver" with even less to do to hold their attention than today, will magically pay attention and save the car from disaster when the computer goes wonky? Impressive level of naivete there...
People will sleep, play video games, text-without-even-pretending-to-pay-attention, "drive" drunk, watch movies, maybe some suckers will even do work. Pretty much anything except pay attention to the loooong boooooring road. So even if something goes wrong, no one will notice until the rescue pulls them from the vehicle.
Not letting kids "drive" in a driverless vehicle amounts to nothing more than ageism, serving no real purpose but to soothe our collective delusions of control while flying down the road at speeds potentially lethal to bags of sentient meat.
I'm really interested why you combined Tcl with Lisp and Scheme though, those languages don't seem to have much together
Although you can force it to behave imperatively, Tcl primarily counts as a functional language (though I have to agree, a bit of an oddball due to its object oriented side).
because it is an inferior mish-mash for an up-start generation which was never taught the, "In the end, everything looks like LISP," maxim.
I have to suspect you as trolling here, because although I do indeed know Lisp (and Scheme, and Tcl) - Very, very little of my code ends up looking anything like Lisp.
And its requirement for particular whitespace offends me as someone who has spent the last decade working with accessibility groups.
I will fully agree with you that required whitespace offends me, but that has fuck-all to do with accessibility. Any programming language that doesn't let you write the entire program on one line with zero whitespace (not that you ever should do that, Perl notwithstanding) has some serious damage.
I'm not really sure I see where R fits, though. For basic statistical work, SPSS is good. For advanced statistical work, surely you'd want a general purpose language with cross-language libraries?
Statisticians != Programmers. TFA's rant very much looks like the newbie programmer after mastering his first language, who then tries to apply that particular hammer to every problem he comes across. "Damnit, that screw will get pounded in! Yes, I can chop through this 2x4 by striking it repeatedly with the claw-end! Yes, I can trick pure C into supporting something vaguely like an associative array!"
Good programmers will eventually realize that the job defines the tool to use. Poor programmers will stay trapped forever in an interpreted language with garbage collection. And Statisticians will go to their grave believing that whatever language they learn first counts as the best choice ever; Physicists have the same problem, thus you often see the most powerful supercomputers on the planet running... Fortran.
This guy has the life expectancy of a fruit fly once he gets outside the nice safe confines of (unintentionally)-protective custody.
And no, not from random geeks raging online. From the likes of the Russian mafia. Expect to hear about him dying in a "colorful" way. I wonder how they'll top Polonium poisoning?
/ Snitches get stitches and end up in... lead-lined coffins buried in limed graves.
This is not 'withdrawal of consent after-the-fact'. There was never any consent for publication. The pictures were taken with the expectation of privacy.
Know how I can tell you didn't read TFA?
This has nothing to do with publication. The court ordered him to delete privately held material that she consented to have taken in the first place.
The man, a photographer, had made erotic videos and taken many intimate photos during the course of the relationship, all of which the woman had given her consent to, even taking some herself.
But when the couple separated she demanded he delete all of the videos and pictures in which she appeared.
The court agreed, stating the consent to use and own privately recorded nude pictures could be withdrawn by the ex-partner on the grounds of personal rights, which are valued higher than the ownership rights of the photographer.
Very simple ruling. She withdrew consent for the pictures to even exist, after the fact.
Only if you're looking at it too closely. At recommended viewing distances, 4K resolution is difficult for most of the population to detect a difference in. Up close, yeah, it's obviously going to look astounding, and most people have "too large" a screen for their viewing distance, so in a way, I guess it works out:)
This largely depends on whether you use it as a TV or a monitor. I use my 4k display as a monitor. It kicks serious, serious butt - Yeah, I can definitely see the difference, though I sit I sit 18-24 inches away from it (riiiight at the point where individual pixels vanish seems like the sweet spot).
As for "recommended" distances... What does that mean exactly? I couldn't care less about how far LG "wants" me to sit from their screens. I sit at a comfortable distance for the task at hand. For TV, yeah, that means maybe 10ft away. For coding, it means "as close as possible while still seeing the whole screen".
Now laws like this need to be adopted by every country in this world, for the benefit of anyone, male or female.
Allowing withdrawal of consent after-the-fact has a hell of a lot of pretty damned scary implications that go way, way beyond shutting down "revenge porn" sites.
Personally, I would consider allowing someone to take pics of me during sex as more serious, due to its permanence, than the sex itself; so what happens when someone decides to withdraw consent for the actual sex (outside Sweden, of course, which already sets a precedent for rape-after-the-fact, and it has left them with the single most castrated male population on the planet)?
Not a good precedent. Attack the actual problem, don't create a tar-pit of a legal loophole to avoid directly addressing the problem. Hell, that same idea applies to most of the BS "X when done on a computer" crimes we so often rail against here on Slashdot. Why does the same thing get a pass when talking about "when done nude"?
There are a ton of online book vendors, and Amazon's online print sales are a small fraction of the print market.
This. Just about everyone, from governments to publishers to authors to readers, have bitched incessantly about Amazon since they started seriously selling books. I would think this move would make the entirety of Hatchette's vertical market thrilled that Amazon has effectively left their local ballgame.
But no - Instead, we see the reality of the situation. No one actually wants Amazon out of the picture; they just want to squeeze a bigger cut out of the transaction.
Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet.
I think Microsoft's target audience here started pretty damned small, and shrinks every day as "normal" tablets become more and more compatible with 3rd party peripherals.
Increasingly, I see people using a tablet exclusively, with some form of docking station to make it more convenient to use as a desktop device. They don't lug around a laptop and a tablet, they just have the tablet and maybe a PC back at the office if they need either some serious horsepower or multiple feet of screen real-estate. So okay, for more than the price of a tablet plus a PC, the top of the line Surface Pro 3 config addresses the horsepower issue, while still having a tablet-sized screen - Too little for too much and targeting too few as a bonus.
Don't get me wrong, I think MS has the right idea on this one, and may actually have led the curve for a change; but until they can also do it for under $300, they may as well not even have tried.
We appear to slowly lose our formerly-well-established pre-digital rights at every turn; with every small victory such as your own DMCA exemption, we suffer another huge loss such as ACTA. Given that, what do you see as the best attainable outcome for our current struggle to preserve privacy and fair use rights for the general public? I don't expect us to reach "GNU/Utopia", of course, but do we have any real hope of avoiding Stallman's Right to Read as the only possible long-term outcome?
Haven't you noticed, in modern Economics real money and assumption of future money are exactly the same!
Only under two assumptions - Investing at the risk-free rate of return, or losing ground against inflation.
In any other scenario, yes, you can compare the future value of two similar risk investments, but failing to factor in different levels of risk commits a grievous error that will leave you begging in the street while your boring neighbor's inflation+1% diversified bond portfolio has him retiring in luxury.
Slashdot Mirror
For a change, I need to agree with Sony (and you) on this one. Whether or not this infringes on "NC" really depends on exactly what they've done with it.
Do they simply display it in a browser-like interface, while preserving the essential webpageyness of the content? If so, I'd call that no more "noncommercial" than using Internet Explorer on Windows to visit Wikia directly. If, however, they've completely butchered the content to fit their marketing department's retarded whims and removed any traces of attribution in the process, that clearly goes well beyond grey area.
We've already accepted that every TV will eventually function as a more-or-less fully capable streaming media center; we also need to accept the implications of that on exactly the present issue. If device-X has a web browser, does device-X need a special license to view any webpage not explicitly marked as free-for-all? And if so, why doesn't MSIE need the same license? What if the TV runs Win8 and actually displays the content in MSIE?
4 million lines of code isn't too far from 500 million? Math is not your strong suit is it.
Not defending what the GP said, but in context, 4 million lines of code sounds just about as reasonable as 500 million. Have any of you visited healthcare.gov? I've personally written substantially more complex websites pulling from multiple datasources (including the backend SQL code and a pair of webservices), and I doubt I have 10k lines between them all total. And yes, that includes comments, and no, I don't write single line multi-megabyte Perl scripts.
The only serious complexity to healthcare.gov comes from getting reliable price feeds from the insurance companies - And that amounts to more of a business problem than a coding one. So when anyone comes out and tells me that PoC (no, not "proof of concept") has X million lines of code, my bullshit detector pegs the meter.
How is "geek culture has a problem with encouraging, or at the very least ignoring, misogyny" the same as saying "pla is a rapist"
Maybe the part where he called a complete psycho's manifesto against humanity (including women) "a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto", and backstepped just a hair to exclude the actual mass murdering part?
That thing reads like TimeCube, and the only difference TFA saw between its author and "a standard frustrated angry geeky guy" involves actually going out and killing people? And you don't see that as maybe just the teensiest bit prejudiced against "standard frustrated angry geeky guy"s?
Go fuck yourself. Seriously. You count as worse than those you accuse, because you at least recognize the existence of a bigger picture, then deliberately ignore it on one side of your equation to get the result you want.
You would paint all of geek culture with the same misogynistic brush... Are all Arabs radical jihadis? Do all women suck at sports? Do all Jews drink the blood of unbaptized Christian babies? Do all blacks rock at sports?
Free hint - When geeks / men / whites / middle-class / $majority_group_x push back against this sort of bullshit, we don't do it because we disagree with your fundamental premise; we do it because you accuse us, you accuse me of doing what you describe, solely for my membership in an extremely loosely defined social grouping, and you don't know a thing about me.
You'll have much better luck trying to make friends among those who agree with you (aside from your "socially acceptable prejudice") than by alienating 99% of the group most able to assist you in your long-term goals, right out of the gate.
What is your basis for stating that "the average joe" has no reason other than blind indoctrination for their religious beliefs?
I presented a testable hypothesis, and even a rough draft of the experimental methodology.
Now, please provide the same for demonstrating whether or not Allah gives two shits about whether or not I exist...
Or someone's blog...
...Complete with shameless plugs to his last few blog posts. Funny, some sites actually ban you for pulling shit like that, even in the discussion* itself. Slashdot makes it an FP.
Pathetic.
* Personally I think that goes too far, on any site with even halfway functional moderation; but can we maybe at least keep the FP content on-topic?
I'm not sure I follow. If antennas are the most likely thing to be struck by lightning in their immediate area, in what sense don't they "attract lightning"?
You could just as well have a grounded ferret cage connected to the antenna, and it would have the same effect.
Perhaps you've never heard the torturous "logic" people use to justify the TV-attracts-lightning myth, and didn't get the reference... Let me give you a good laugh, friend - Basically, it goes something along the lines of "I have a friend of a friend whose engineer husband says TVs work on just the right frequency that they actually pull in all the lightning for miles around"... Then ask them if they still unplug their LCD TV, now that CRTs have become a historical curiosity. Another common variation runs that somehow, TVs count as especially vulnerable to "exploding" when struck by lightning (as opposed to everything else that explodes when struck by lightning - Trees, microwave ovens, ferrets...
Everything requires some amount of faith. If nothing else, we must have faith that things outside of our own thoughts exist and logic will continue to work as we know it from one moment to the next.
Solipsism doesn't make for a very good working hypothesis, nor does the denial of it take "faith". I have zero "faith" that the external world will continue to exist long enough for me to submit this post - I just don't even waste the CPU time giving the concept a second thought (stoned mental diarrhea aside - And that still doesn't involve any more "faith" than pondering the physics behind Santa's annual trip, or whether Jerry Garcia could have taken his own weight in acid over his lifetime).
Unfortunately, there is no escaping a little faith in order to keep on functioning as a sane, cogent being.
Not giving something mental air-time doesn't require you to believe the opposite. As a good example, I consider the existence of extraterrestrial life as highly probable, statistically. That said, the kooks you see promoting modern UFO culture, I hold in such high esteem as all the other unmedicated psychotics you see arguing with themselves while waiting for the bus.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
You can still "believe" in true things. I fully expect the average Joe's belief in how electricity makes their lights work as substantially similar to belief in $Deity - They have no clue at all about the underlying principles at work, and just blindly repeat the same things their parents did out of indoctrinated habit.
Ask ten random people whether TVs "attract" lightning (as opposed to your antenna simply counting as the highest good conductor in the immediate area), and you'll probably weep for humanity at how many of them say "yes".
What an amazingly stupid TFA... In what world does belief in anything have scientific literacy as a prerequisite?
A person can "believe" in evolution or general relativity or the Higgs boson the same way they can believe in Zeus or Jesus or the Easter Bunny. In the former set of cases, they hold true beliefs entirely by coincidence, with no more solid basis than those who adhere to the latter set.
The difference between the two domains of belief comes from the demonstrability of the former as viable hypotheses, not yet disproven (or more accurately, "not yet rejected for the null hypothesis") by experiment. The latter have pretty much exhaustively had all but the most untestable of their predictions thoroughly trounced. And where science grows as the gaps shrink, well, the gaps necessarily shrink.
So where do I download the optimized Bitcoin miner for these demos, and does anyone have a few thousand throwaway email addresses I can borrow for 24 hours?
And as it turns out, much of the job of new CompSci grads involves killing application systems and designing database entry screens.
Support has always counted as one of the biggest PITAs in software engineering. Reducing that to something we can handle server side has made a world of difference to how much it sucks to take a nice clean app and actually give it to (ugh!) users.
Now, I'll agree data-entry front-ends have very little glamor to them. But keep in mind, someone gets to write the back-end code - Data entry doesn't accomplish much if you don't do something with the data.
no. the idea of an autonomous vehicle with no possible driver to override it is just plain stupid.
You realize that as soon as we really do have autonomous cars, the adult drivers will become just as useless as a 12YO heading for the mall? Pretending anything else will happen, that somehow an adult "driver" with even less to do to hold their attention than today, will magically pay attention and save the car from disaster when the computer goes wonky? Impressive level of naivete there...
People will sleep, play video games, text-without-even-pretending-to-pay-attention, "drive" drunk, watch movies, maybe some suckers will even do work. Pretty much anything except pay attention to the loooong boooooring road. So even if something goes wrong, no one will notice until the rescue pulls them from the vehicle.
Not letting kids "drive" in a driverless vehicle amounts to nothing more than ageism, serving no real purpose but to soothe our collective delusions of control while flying down the road at speeds potentially lethal to bags of sentient meat.
Now I can have all the joy of eating fruit, without needing to actually eat a fruit!
Wait, what?
/ Yo dawg, I heard you like fruit...
I'm really interested why you combined Tcl with Lisp and Scheme though, those languages don't seem to have much together
Although you can force it to behave imperatively, Tcl primarily counts as a functional language (though I have to agree, a bit of an oddball due to its object oriented side).
because it is an inferior mish-mash for an up-start generation which was never taught the, "In the end, everything looks like LISP," maxim.
I have to suspect you as trolling here, because although I do indeed know Lisp (and Scheme, and Tcl) - Very, very little of my code ends up looking anything like Lisp.
And its requirement for particular whitespace offends me as someone who has spent the last decade working with accessibility groups.
I will fully agree with you that required whitespace offends me, but that has fuck-all to do with accessibility. Any programming language that doesn't let you write the entire program on one line with zero whitespace (not that you ever should do that, Perl notwithstanding) has some serious damage.
I'm not really sure I see where R fits, though. For basic statistical work, SPSS is good. For advanced statistical work, surely you'd want a general purpose language with cross-language libraries?
Statisticians != Programmers. TFA's rant very much looks like the newbie programmer after mastering his first language, who then tries to apply that particular hammer to every problem he comes across. "Damnit, that screw will get pounded in! Yes, I can chop through this 2x4 by striking it repeatedly with the claw-end! Yes, I can trick pure C into supporting something vaguely like an associative array!"
Good programmers will eventually realize that the job defines the tool to use. Poor programmers will stay trapped forever in an interpreted language with garbage collection. And Statisticians will go to their grave believing that whatever language they learn first counts as the best choice ever; Physicists have the same problem, thus you often see the most powerful supercomputers on the planet running... Fortran.
This guy has the life expectancy of a fruit fly once he gets outside the nice safe confines of (unintentionally)-protective custody.
And no, not from random geeks raging online. From the likes of the Russian mafia. Expect to hear about him dying in a "colorful" way. I wonder how they'll top Polonium poisoning?
/ Snitches get stitches and end up in... lead-lined coffins buried in limed graves.
Know how I can tell you didn't read TFA?
This has nothing to do with publication. The court ordered him to delete privately held material that she consented to have taken in the first place.
Very simple ruling. She withdrew consent for the pictures to even exist, after the fact.
Only if you're looking at it too closely. At recommended viewing distances, 4K resolution is difficult for most of the population to detect a difference in. Up close, yeah, it's obviously going to look astounding, and most people have "too large" a screen for their viewing distance, so in a way, I guess it works out :)
This largely depends on whether you use it as a TV or a monitor. I use my 4k display as a monitor. It kicks serious, serious butt - Yeah, I can definitely see the difference, though I sit I sit 18-24 inches away from it (riiiight at the point where individual pixels vanish seems like the sweet spot).
As for "recommended" distances... What does that mean exactly? I couldn't care less about how far LG "wants" me to sit from their screens. I sit at a comfortable distance for the task at hand. For TV, yeah, that means maybe 10ft away. For coding, it means "as close as possible while still seeing the whole screen".
Now laws like this need to be adopted by every country in this world, for the benefit of anyone, male or female.
Allowing withdrawal of consent after-the-fact has a hell of a lot of pretty damned scary implications that go way, way beyond shutting down "revenge porn" sites.
Personally, I would consider allowing someone to take pics of me during sex as more serious, due to its permanence, than the sex itself; so what happens when someone decides to withdraw consent for the actual sex (outside Sweden, of course, which already sets a precedent for rape-after-the-fact, and it has left them with the single most castrated male population on the planet)?
Not a good precedent. Attack the actual problem, don't create a tar-pit of a legal loophole to avoid directly addressing the problem. Hell, that same idea applies to most of the BS "X when done on a computer" crimes we so often rail against here on Slashdot. Why does the same thing get a pass when talking about "when done nude"?
There are a ton of online book vendors, and Amazon's online print sales are a small fraction of the print market.
This. Just about everyone, from governments to publishers to authors to readers, have bitched incessantly about Amazon since they started seriously selling books. I would think this move would make the entirety of Hatchette's vertical market thrilled that Amazon has effectively left their local ballgame.
But no - Instead, we see the reality of the situation. No one actually wants Amazon out of the picture; they just want to squeeze a bigger cut out of the transaction.
Fucking hypocrites, from end to end.
Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet.
I think Microsoft's target audience here started pretty damned small, and shrinks every day as "normal" tablets become more and more compatible with 3rd party peripherals.
Increasingly, I see people using a tablet exclusively, with some form of docking station to make it more convenient to use as a desktop device. They don't lug around a laptop and a tablet, they just have the tablet and maybe a PC back at the office if they need either some serious horsepower or multiple feet of screen real-estate. So okay, for more than the price of a tablet plus a PC, the top of the line Surface Pro 3 config addresses the horsepower issue, while still having a tablet-sized screen - Too little for too much and targeting too few as a bonus.
Don't get me wrong, I think MS has the right idea on this one, and may actually have led the curve for a change; but until they can also do it for under $300, they may as well not even have tried.
We appear to slowly lose our formerly-well-established pre-digital rights at every turn; with every small victory such as your own DMCA exemption, we suffer another huge loss such as ACTA. Given that, what do you see as the best attainable outcome for our current struggle to preserve privacy and fair use rights for the general public? I don't expect us to reach "GNU/Utopia", of course, but do we have any real hope of avoiding Stallman's Right to Read as the only possible long-term outcome?
Just like Canada.
Well sure, if you wanted to say it in French. Same thing, more or less.
Haven't you noticed, in modern Economics real money and assumption of future money are exactly the same!
Only under two assumptions - Investing at the risk-free rate of return, or losing ground against inflation.
In any other scenario, yes, you can compare the future value of two similar risk investments, but failing to factor in different levels of risk commits a grievous error that will leave you begging in the street while your boring neighbor's inflation+1% diversified bond portfolio has him retiring in luxury.