MPAA gets to choose their business model. They don't get to ban entire Internet protocols, arbitrarily shut down websites without due process, kick end-users off the Internet, or any other non-business-model-related "rights" they've been lobbying for.
It's a legit point. Claiming that "piracy isn't the problem the MPAA shrieks it is" is not the same thing as claiming that "piracy isn't theft".
You can't determine the appropriate response to a problem without correctly grasping how much of a problem it is. We as a country made a decision that the problem of highway accidents wasn't severe enough to justify a 55MPH speed limit, and raised it to 70MPH, for example. As a more appropriate example, we also decided that the threat of piracy by VCR was not severe enough to ban the production and sale of VCRs - as the MPAA tried to propose.
So, to reiterate: people can think piracy is theft while also thinking the MPAA is vastly exaggerating the severity of the problem.
Still has some minor rough spots (xfburn doesn't seem to let me drag-n-drop files from thunnar) but gets the job done. And I have to upgrade my parents' machine soon; I can't imagine trying to teach them Unity. So, Xubuntu for them, too.
Doesn't have to start a mass exodus. It's just one more step, but a nice one. Games are literally the only reason I ever boot into Windows anymore; every other use is handily managed by Linux. With the current malware flood, there's pressure away from Windows. Lowering the 'potential barrier' will mean more flow to Linux.
People don't have to 'mass convert'. Windows just has to not grow, while the alternatives grow. Eventually the malware types will have to shift their focus, sure, but by then Windows will be a shadow of its former self.
I wish people would stop bashing the non-vaccinators (I'm not one of them).
Pointing out the inevitable consequences of not vaccinating isn't "bashing".
those at risk should be vaccinated if they're concerned
Not everyone can be vaccinated, and many (such as the elderly) don't develop a strong immunity when vaccinated. For example, in my son's kindergarten class, there's a kid who have to have a liver transplant, and hence is on immunosuppressive drugs. Having my kids vaccinated helps protect that kid's life.
There is also a near certainty that a disease that is vaccinated but not eradicated will eventually evolve immunity to the vaccine - which could be construed as the vaccinated kids causing problems.
You don't understand how vaccines work.
They expose the adaptive immune system to the virus/bacterium in question. The adaptive immune system develops (in a pretty much evolutionary way) a response. It's unique to every individual - no two people produce the same antibodies. Some of them are more effective than others (hence the differing strength of immunity people display after being vaccinated, and why some rare people get really lucky and develop robust immune responses even to outliers like HIV) but there's such a variety that disease organisms can't "evolve immunity" in the way you're talking about.
Some fast-mutating viruses - like the flu, or even more, the cold viruses - can change enough to require new vaccines periodically, sure. But (a) that's not 'evolving immunity to a vaccine' and (b) the old vaccine remains just as effective against the old variants.
It's probably a breakdown in herd immunity. Not everyone who gets the vaccine develops a strong immunity to it. But if enough of the population is vaccinated, the disease doesn't have enough vulnerable hosts to spread. In other words, vaccination doesn't just protect you, it protects the people you come in contact with, too.
Sadly, with fewer people getting vaccinated, there's more of a chance for pockets of disease to linger, and catch not only unvaccinated people but also those who didn't respond strongly to the vaccine.
...you're not part of the intended audience. Admittedly, there's a lot of necessary hardware support to get these kinds of results, but still... full A/V in a space less than the banner image of most websites. Makes you wonder what could be done with similar techniques and, say, a megabyte of space.
Though, I don't know why that has to be done in video.
Exactly. I read so much faster than people speak. I hate having to listen to podcasts or watch videos for something that's just as easily - and up to around five times as efficiently - done via text. Some things need pictures or video, sure - but not interviews, ffs.
I'd say, when your open-source project is better because you made it open-source, it's successful. My own minor projects have been improved by testing, bug reports, bug fixes, and new feature contributions through the years. Certainly they are more useful to me now than they would have been if I was the only one working on them.
I have my parents on Linux. They used to use Windows, but I got them on Firefox and Thunderbird, and then switching them over was easy. Now when we come over for dinner, I'm not spending half an hour or more cleaning out malware and untangling registry cruft and so on. If they have a problem when I'm not around, I can SSH in and tweak it.
In the real world, most people don't know how to administer a computer, be it Windows or Linux or even Mac. So they get their brother or sister or kids or their friend who's "good with computers" to support them. (My wife got me a t-shirt to wear to family reunions that says, "No, I will not fix your computer.") So if you're going to be supporting someone's computer, shouldn't it be a system that's easier to support?
How feasible would it be to build a 'GPS faker' that could feed false data to such a tracking device? It'd be fun to see what they made of a car that apparently levitated, flew across the Pacific ocean at Mach 3, then returned to its starting point...
I ride the bus to and from work every day. I could carry a dumb phone, plus an mp3 player, plus a netbook, I suppose... but instead I have an original Droid, and it gets all that done in a much smaller and more convenient package, along with GPS navigation, flash drive file transport, encrypted password wallet, and a cheap camera.
There is still an insanely low margin on baking using 'fancy' ingredients.
I suspect we are talking at cross purposes. There's marginal cost (how much it costs to make "N+1" units vs. just "N" units) and then there's profit margin (how much you charge for the unit vs. how much it cost to make).
In terms of ingredient costs, sure, baking eleven cakes doesn't cost a whole lot more than making ten cakes. But if you're hand-decorating each cake to finish them - especially if they are unique orders, as was the case in the linked article, where people could order which cake and frosting - the marginal labor costs are a lot harder to get around. If you get into overtime, adding that 'one extra cake' costs quite a bit more, for example. And once you hit the limit of what'll fit into the oven at one time (say, X), you have a discontinuous jump in what the "X+1" will cost in terms of time and effort.
The profit margin needs to be quite a bit higher than the marginal cost of ingredients, because of the labor. Even in a busy grocery store that does baking in bulk, the cake mixes (ingredients) cost a whole lot less than the finished cakes (after the labor).
There's more to a thing than the some of the components: whether it's a baked good's ingredients or a iPhone's transistors.
Exactly.
How long do cupcakes take to bake? How much does the oven cost to run? How long do they take to cool before you can begin decorating? How long do they take to decorate? How long do the utensils take to clean between batches, plus the resources (water, soap, drying time) to do so? How much fridge space do you have, and how much do they cost to run? How much are you paying your staff? Note that for a big rush like this at least one of them will be on full-time register duty and unavailable for baking/decorating. Is anyone going to be free to take new orders (e.g. that couple that came in planning to spend a few hundred on a wedding cake...)?
The raw ingredients are one of the smallest contributors to cost.
Most baking is on a very low margin because of the bulk batches made by the Baker.
Well, for chain stores, sure. My wife runs a bakery - specialty cake shop - and margins have to be higher because of specialized ingredients, lower volume, personalized decorating, and so forth. It tastes a lot better than the bulk-produced stuff you get at Costco or Sam's or even the grocery story, but it costs noticeably more, too.
She and George Clooney just walked away from the scene as if nothing had really happened to them.
I remember pointing that out to my dad when we saw that movie. "Everyone you see in this pan-out shot who isn't in a radiation suit - including that guy there with his mask off - is now dead."
Not everyone will be vaccinated, and not everyone who does get vaccinated will develop immunity. But if enough people are vaccinated, then the disease can't reach enough susceptibles to spread and even the people who aren't immune are protected, too.
There's a kid in my son's first grade class with a liver transplant, and is hence on immunosupressive drugs. Vaccinating my kids helps protect that kid's life. Same principle with all vaccines.
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MPAA gets to choose their business model. They don't get to ban entire Internet protocols, arbitrarily shut down websites without due process, kick end-users off the Internet, or any other non-business-model-related "rights" they've been lobbying for.
You can't determine the appropriate response to a problem without correctly grasping how much of a problem it is. We as a country made a decision that the problem of highway accidents wasn't severe enough to justify a 55MPH speed limit, and raised it to 70MPH, for example. As a more appropriate example, we also decided that the threat of piracy by VCR was not severe enough to ban the production and sale of VCRs - as the MPAA tried to propose.
So, to reiterate: people can think piracy is theft while also thinking the MPAA is vastly exaggerating the severity of the problem.
Still has some minor rough spots (xfburn doesn't seem to let me drag-n-drop files from thunnar) but gets the job done. And I have to upgrade my parents' machine soon; I can't imagine trying to teach them Unity. So, Xubuntu for them, too.
Zombies and P=NP.
People don't have to 'mass convert'. Windows just has to not grow, while the alternatives grow. Eventually the malware types will have to shift their focus, sure, but by then Windows will be a shadow of its former self.
Pointing out the inevitable consequences of not vaccinating isn't "bashing".
Not everyone can be vaccinated, and many (such as the elderly) don't develop a strong immunity when vaccinated. For example, in my son's kindergarten class, there's a kid who have to have a liver transplant, and hence is on immunosuppressive drugs. Having my kids vaccinated helps protect that kid's life.
You don't understand how vaccines work.
They expose the adaptive immune system to the virus/bacterium in question. The adaptive immune system develops (in a pretty much evolutionary way) a response. It's unique to every individual - no two people produce the same antibodies. Some of them are more effective than others (hence the differing strength of immunity people display after being vaccinated, and why some rare people get really lucky and develop robust immune responses even to outliers like HIV) but there's such a variety that disease organisms can't "evolve immunity" in the way you're talking about.
Some fast-mutating viruses - like the flu, or even more, the cold viruses - can change enough to require new vaccines periodically, sure. But (a) that's not 'evolving immunity to a vaccine' and (b) the old vaccine remains just as effective against the old variants.
Sadly, with fewer people getting vaccinated, there's more of a chance for pockets of disease to linger, and catch not only unvaccinated people but also those who didn't respond strongly to the vaccine.
Young-Earth creationism was considered. For the whole of scientific history, up until the late 1800s when the gathering evidence finally made it impossible for geologists to take the idea seriously.
"Intelligent Design" has also been considered, and so far it has failed the tests. Every proposed example of "irreducible complexity", for example, has been conclusively shown not to be - the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, the vertebrate immune system, and so forth. Cdesign proponentsists" can't even coherently define the 'information' they think living things display.
That's why we say that creationism and ID are not science.
...you're not part of the intended audience. Admittedly, there's a lot of necessary hardware support to get these kinds of results, but still... full A/V in a space less than the banner image of most websites. Makes you wonder what could be done with similar techniques and, say, a megabyte of space.
Exactly. I read so much faster than people speak. I hate having to listen to podcasts or watch videos for something that's just as easily - and up to around five times as efficiently - done via text. Some things need pictures or video, sure - but not interviews, ffs.
I'd say, when your open-source project is better because you made it open-source, it's successful. My own minor projects have been improved by testing, bug reports, bug fixes, and new feature contributions through the years. Certainly they are more useful to me now than they would have been if I was the only one working on them.
"Science" teaches that the Earth is round. Why not teach the controversy?
This.
I have my parents on Linux. They used to use Windows, but I got them on Firefox and Thunderbird, and then switching them over was easy. Now when we come over for dinner, I'm not spending half an hour or more cleaning out malware and untangling registry cruft and so on. If they have a problem when I'm not around, I can SSH in and tweak it.
In the real world, most people don't know how to administer a computer, be it Windows or Linux or even Mac. So they get their brother or sister or kids or their friend who's "good with computers" to support them. (My wife got me a t-shirt to wear to family reunions that says, "No, I will not fix your computer.") So if you're going to be supporting someone's computer, shouldn't it be a system that's easier to support?
The comic lies in the trash; falls from my fingers, is in my hand.
Make it laser-cut just for extra geek points.
How feasible would it be to build a 'GPS faker' that could feed false data to such a tracking device? It'd be fun to see what they made of a car that apparently levitated, flew across the Pacific ocean at Mach 3, then returned to its starting point...
Holy crap! I have never in my life done that before! I had no idea such a thing was even possible!
(Or, just maybe I load them onto my phone. And save the dead-tree stuff for bedside at home.)
I ride the bus to and from work every day. I could carry a dumb phone, plus an mp3 player, plus a netbook, I suppose... but instead I have an original Droid, and it gets all that done in a much smaller and more convenient package, along with GPS navigation, flash drive file transport, encrypted password wallet, and a cheap camera.
Hopefully this helps you understand where the idea of 'dark matter' came from. (Hint: arses don't seem to be an element.)
I happen to agree - it's basically a fad. Of course, cupcakes aren't a major part of my wife's business. :)
I suspect we are talking at cross purposes. There's marginal cost (how much it costs to make "N+1" units vs. just "N" units) and then there's profit margin (how much you charge for the unit vs. how much it cost to make).
In terms of ingredient costs, sure, baking eleven cakes doesn't cost a whole lot more than making ten cakes. But if you're hand-decorating each cake to finish them - especially if they are unique orders, as was the case in the linked article, where people could order which cake and frosting - the marginal labor costs are a lot harder to get around. If you get into overtime, adding that 'one extra cake' costs quite a bit more, for example. And once you hit the limit of what'll fit into the oven at one time (say, X), you have a discontinuous jump in what the "X+1" will cost in terms of time and effort.
The profit margin needs to be quite a bit higher than the marginal cost of ingredients, because of the labor. Even in a busy grocery store that does baking in bulk, the cake mixes (ingredients) cost a whole lot less than the finished cakes (after the labor).
Exactly.
How long do cupcakes take to bake? How much does the oven cost to run? How long do they take to cool before you can begin decorating? How long do they take to decorate? How long do the utensils take to clean between batches, plus the resources (water, soap, drying time) to do so? How much fridge space do you have, and how much do they cost to run? How much are you paying your staff? Note that for a big rush like this at least one of them will be on full-time register duty and unavailable for baking/decorating. Is anyone going to be free to take new orders (e.g. that couple that came in planning to spend a few hundred on a wedding cake...)?
The raw ingredients are one of the smallest contributors to cost.
Well, for chain stores, sure. My wife runs a bakery - specialty cake shop - and margins have to be higher because of specialized ingredients, lower volume, personalized decorating, and so forth. It tastes a lot better than the bulk-produced stuff you get at Costco or Sam's or even the grocery story, but it costs noticeably more, too.
I remember pointing that out to my dad when we saw that movie. "Everyone you see in this pan-out shot who isn't in a radiation suit - including that guy there with his mask off - is now dead."
Not everyone will be vaccinated, and not everyone who does get vaccinated will develop immunity. But if enough people are vaccinated, then the disease can't reach enough susceptibles to spread and even the people who aren't immune are protected, too.
There's a kid in my son's first grade class with a liver transplant, and is hence on immunosupressive drugs. Vaccinating my kids helps protect that kid's life. Same principle with all vaccines.