You can't file an antitrust suit against a coalition of countries. Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries There aren't any international antitrust laws. And yes the whole POINT of OPEC is to make more money off the United States. The only thing you can do about OPEC is war, and who would threaten to use nuclear weapons against humans just for the sake of oil? Oh wait...
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
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Soviet Moon Rocket
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The space pen was not developed by NASA. It was designed by Fisher and offered to NASA for free (for marketing reasons of course). It is also used by the Russian space program. The "space pen vs. pencil" thing is a joke.
I would say that "otaku" the Japanese word means exactly what you say, while "otaku" in the anime-fan dialect of English means "person obsessed with anime"
Don't go to Japan and try to use "otaku" that way, but don't try to use it when you talk to your grandmother, either.
Part of capitalism is the idea that prices will naturally flow to a fair point, since companies have to keep their prices low to be competitive. Antitrust comes in when companies try to beat the system and remove competition from the equation so that they can have high prices.
"Price fixing" is never a company charging "too much". It's about systematically removing the competitive element from a market so that you can control it. In the case of retail industries, price competition starts at the end consumer purchase. The retailer doesn't care all that much if an item costs say $50 from the distributor if they can charge $100 for it. However if competition with other retailers lowers the price to $55, the retailer will start putting pressure on the distributor (perhaps by threatening to stop carrying their products) to lower the distributor's price to $25. This creates competition among distributors and lowers their profit margins.
In the case of the record companies, they sought to avoid this trend not by defining the prices that retailers could charge (which is highly illegal) but by defining the price that they could *advertise* (which is less illegal). Most consumers won't do very heavy comparison shopping unless an advertisement clues them in, so this prevents the retailers from putting much pressure on each other; as a result most of them just charged MSRP. What's the point of having a lower price if you can't advertise it, anyway? This results in no pricing pressure on the record companies, since the retailers are making plenty of money per unit at MSRP.
The government never sets any sort of price limits for an industry unless they decide to formally regulate it, which is never done with luxury items. Antitrust is about certain methods of doing business which must be illegal for capitalism to work.
>>"email" no longer *means* "electronic mail"
>What?! Says who? Since when? Where?
Webster's definition of "e-mail" is:
1 : a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between terminals linked by telephone lines or microwave relays)
2 : a message sent electronically
Note first of all the absence of the word "mail". Note secondly how bad this definition is. Is a fax e-mail? It's both "electronic" and similar to "mail", and the above definition fits it, but email it ain't.
I don't agree with you on the "email" issue, though I'm aware that Webster's does. The word "email" no longer *means* "electronic mail", so there's no reason that the hyphenated usage would be appropriate. Essentially I don't see why we would put a hypen in the middle of a legitimate common word. Why not call it "em-ail" then? Also, according to Google "email" is about ten times as common as "e-mail" on the Web. (As an interesting comparison, the correct usage "viruses" is about thirty times as common as the incorrect "virii", even though "virii" is often attributed to Internet users.)
I don't like "Email" either, since email is hardly a proper noun. Let's add "email" to the language. If not now, when?
I don't think your ideals are very realistic. The truth is that contracts are not magical, and it is a government's responsibility to determine which sorts of contracts it will and will not expend resources to enforce. I don't see why I should be required to pay MANDATORY taxes to support contracts that are part of a system that is not in my interest. So sure, write whatever screwing-the-populace license you want, just don't expect me to pay to have my police enforce it for you.
A conventional warhead is dramatically less practical than a nuclear weapon simply because you have to ship all the oxygen for the reaction along with it. Nuclear gives you far better power for the pound, especially since they work just fine in a vacuum.
Well, I'm not really supporting his point so much, but take your standard average single-celled organism and tell me how old it is. You could tell me how long it's been since it last divided, but division isn't a process where one cell Ceases to Be and two appear out of nothing. In many ways it's still the same cell it was a million years ago. No cell in the world has been rebuilt from scratch for billions of years. Thermodynamics isn't meaningful here because the biosphere has a constant influx of usable energy.
Of course, this is an interesting point of debate, kind of like wondering whether a computer in which every single piece has been upgraded at some point is really the same computer as it once was. Then again, I think I've heard that supposedly all the matter in a human body gets replaced within about seven years, so there you go.
If you're so obsessed with graphics, why don't you go back to your PC? Seriously, when I'm playing GTA3 I don't think "Man, if this had more bump mapping like Halo it'd be cool instead of sucking". Newsflash: I don't want to play Halo; as far as I'm concerned it's a FPS which means it sucks. What matters most to me about this new generation of consoles is mostly the larger media. If graphics aren't your most important priority, the xbox is a clear loser right now. It simply doesn't offer me anything much that I want. You may have different priorities, just don't forget that there are people who really prefer the PS2. I don't honestly think the xbox will ever come close to the PS2 in the titles race, but I could be wrong. We'll see.
I wasn't aware that there were ANY first-person shooters for the PS2. I certainly don't have one, and I have like 10 titles. Never heard of one either. And I've only got the one token racing game.
everyone I've spoken with hates the trackpads. I personally don't have the dexterity to operate one very well, and always have to give up and plug in a mouse. I don't know why nobody makes notebooks without a trackball anymore, but I prefer the eraserhead anyway.
I don't know, I was having a problem with a Linux device driver and I provided a report of what was going on and received a custom kernel patch. Didn't even pay for it. Only took a couple of days too. Sure, maybe other people wouldn't have the same experience, but that was mine.
At that price, are you sure that you didn't end up buying the one that was stolen from your friend?
That would be an interesting game... go around like a dorm and steal stuff, then insert a tap on their upstream router that redirects ebay pageviews to your Secret Stolen Stuff Site... think about it.
You say "the GPL would probably lose in court". Why? You don't claim to have any legal experience, and neither do I, but it seems odd that you'd make claims about probabilities.
The GPL is based on the same theory that commerical software licenses are based on: we take a piece of software and copyright it (it's been clearly established that software is copyrightable; therefore there is not any sort of doubt as to whether GPL'd works are validly copyrighted). Since the work is copyrighted, we can require people who wish to copy the work to agree to our terms, whatever they are. We can require them to quack if we want.
If the GPL is not a valid grant of copy license, realize that means the works cannot be distributed at all. It's impossible for copyrighted works to enter the public domain before expiration unless the copyright owner allows it. The GPL is clearly not a statement of public-domain intentions.
If you violate the GPL and are sued, you can either admit that you agreed to the GPL or you can claim you didn't. If you did, we're out of copyright law (and so it doesn't matter what copyright law was designed for) and into contract law. In contract law, you largely don't have rights that you've agreed not to have; you agreed not to violate it when you agreed to it. If you claim you never agreed to the GPL, you're copying a copyrighted work without a license: old-fashioned copyright infringement. It doesn't even matter if the person who gave it to you in the first place violated the GPL and took the copyright notices off; it's still copyrighted (though the penalties would likely be smaller in that case). Copyright doesn't just magically disappear because someone uses it for something other than "you-give-me-money-I-give-you-software" material-world emulation.
well if at any point, the kernel simply locks cold and doesn't do anything, the journaling will work fine since it's prepared for the case of a power outage. If the kernel gets corrupted in some odd way but doesn't write to the disk again, the journal will also be fine. You are right that filesystem integrity could be damaged by a corrupted kernel that continued to operate; it would also be possible for such a beast to install Windows XP on all its filesystems, since in that case we are by definition in an undefined condition. I think it's generally unlikely for such a thing to happen, but it's certainly possible and it's happened before (well, maybe not the Windows XP part...)
The CMOS has never been SRAM. SRAM does not have to be refreshed like DRAM but it WILL lose data if subjected to a sustained power loss. The CMOS these days is Flash RAM; on older machines it was some form of ROM. SRAM is used in modern systems only for CPU and memory caches. SRAM is VERY fast, whereas flash and ROM are both slower than plain old DRAM.
The phrase "begging the question" has never meant "asking the question". "Begging the question" is a name for a specific logical fallacy. Please see http://skepdic.com/begging.html
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You can't file an antitrust suit against a coalition of countries.
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
There aren't any international antitrust laws. And yes the whole POINT of OPEC is to make more money off the United States.
The only thing you can do about OPEC is war, and who would threaten to use nuclear weapons against humans just for the sake of oil? Oh wait...
The space pen was not developed by NASA. It was designed by Fisher and offered to NASA for free (for marketing reasons of course). It is also used by the Russian space program. The "space pen vs. pencil" thing is a joke.
I would say that "otaku" the Japanese word means exactly what you say, while "otaku" in the anime-fan dialect of English means "person obsessed with anime"
Don't go to Japan and try to use "otaku" that way, but don't try to use it when you talk to your grandmother, either.
As you can read in that first article, that was actually done in 1999. I think there was a Slashdot story on it.
But no 286 board was ever layered.
It's not ever really about lowering prices.
Part of capitalism is the idea that prices will naturally flow to a fair point, since companies have to keep their prices low to be competitive. Antitrust comes in when companies try to beat the system and remove competition from the equation so that they can have high prices.
"Price fixing" is never a company charging "too much". It's about systematically removing the competitive element from a market so that you can control it. In the case of retail industries, price competition starts at the end consumer purchase. The retailer doesn't care all that much if an item costs say $50 from the distributor if they can charge $100 for it. However if competition with other retailers lowers the price to $55, the retailer will start putting pressure on the distributor (perhaps by threatening to stop carrying their products) to lower the distributor's price to $25. This creates competition among distributors and lowers their profit margins.
In the case of the record companies, they sought to avoid this trend not by defining the prices that retailers could charge (which is highly illegal) but by defining the price that they could *advertise* (which is less illegal). Most consumers won't do very heavy comparison shopping unless an advertisement clues them in, so this prevents the retailers from putting much pressure on each other; as a result most of them just charged MSRP. What's the point of having a lower price if you can't advertise it, anyway? This results in no pricing pressure on the record companies, since the retailers are making plenty of money per unit at MSRP.
The government never sets any sort of price limits for an industry unless they decide to formally regulate it, which is never done with luxury items. Antitrust is about certain methods of doing business which must be illegal for capitalism to work.
>>"email" no longer *means* "electronic mail"
>What?! Says who? Since when? Where?
Webster's definition of "e-mail" is:
1 : a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between terminals linked by telephone lines or microwave relays)
2 : a message sent electronically
Note first of all the absence of the word "mail". Note secondly how bad this definition is. Is a fax e-mail? It's both "electronic" and similar to "mail", and the above definition fits it, but email it ain't.
I don't agree with you on the "email" issue, though I'm aware that Webster's does. The word "email" no longer *means* "electronic mail", so there's no reason that the hyphenated usage would be appropriate. Essentially I don't see why we would put a hypen in the middle of a legitimate common word. Why not call it "em-ail" then? Also, according to Google "email" is about ten times as common as "e-mail" on the Web. (As an interesting comparison, the correct usage "viruses" is about thirty times as common as the incorrect "virii", even though "virii" is often attributed to Internet users.)
I don't like "Email" either, since email is hardly a proper noun. Let's add "email" to the language. If not now, when?
Why do people say "faster than God"? Hasn't anybody noticed that God is SLOW?
I don't think your ideals are very realistic. The truth is that contracts are not magical, and it is a government's responsibility to determine which sorts of contracts it will and will not expend resources to enforce. I don't see why I should be required to pay MANDATORY taxes to support contracts that are part of a system that is not in my interest. So sure, write whatever screwing-the-populace license you want, just don't expect me to pay to have my police enforce it for you.
A conventional warhead is dramatically less practical than a nuclear weapon simply because you have to ship all the oxygen for the reaction along with it. Nuclear gives you far better power for the pound, especially since they work just fine in a vacuum.
Well, I'm not really supporting his point so much, but take your standard average single-celled organism and tell me how old it is. You could tell me how long it's been since it last divided, but division isn't a process where one cell Ceases to Be and two appear out of nothing. In many ways it's still the same cell it was a million years ago. No cell in the world has been rebuilt from scratch for billions of years. Thermodynamics isn't meaningful here because the biosphere has a constant influx of usable energy.
Of course, this is an interesting point of debate, kind of like wondering whether a computer in which every single piece has been upgraded at some point is really the same computer as it once was. Then again, I think I've heard that supposedly all the matter in a human body gets replaced within about seven years, so there you go.
What about "why pay for a newspaper every morning when I can just read the one in the company break room"?
Newspapers don't make money on sales so this is a bad analogy anyway.
If you're so obsessed with graphics, why don't you go back to your PC? Seriously, when I'm playing GTA3 I don't think "Man, if this had more bump mapping like Halo it'd be cool instead of sucking". Newsflash: I don't want to play Halo; as far as I'm concerned it's a FPS which means it sucks. What matters most to me about this new generation of consoles is mostly the larger media. If graphics aren't your most important priority, the xbox is a clear loser right now. It simply doesn't offer me anything much that I want. You may have different priorities, just don't forget that there are people who really prefer the PS2. I don't honestly think the xbox will ever come close to the PS2 in the titles race, but I could be wrong. We'll see.
I wasn't aware that there were ANY first-person shooters for the PS2. I certainly don't have one, and I have like 10 titles. Never heard of one either. And I've only got the one token racing game.
everyone I've spoken with hates the trackpads. I personally don't have the dexterity to operate one very well, and always have to give up and plug in a mouse. I don't know why nobody makes notebooks without a trackball anymore, but I prefer the eraserhead anyway.
I don't know, I was having a problem with a Linux device driver and I provided a report of what was going on and received a custom kernel patch. Didn't even pay for it. Only took a couple of days too. Sure, maybe other people wouldn't have the same experience, but that was mine.
At that price, are you sure that you didn't end up buying the one that was stolen from your friend?
That would be an interesting game... go around like a dorm and steal stuff, then insert a tap on their upstream router that redirects ebay pageviews to your Secret Stolen Stuff Site... think about it.
In other words you want a relational database for a filesystem. I think some of IBM's mainframes have features like that.
You say "the GPL would probably lose in court". Why? You don't claim to have any legal experience, and neither do I, but it seems odd that you'd make claims about probabilities.
The GPL is based on the same theory that commerical software licenses are based on: we take a piece of software and copyright it (it's been clearly established that software is copyrightable; therefore there is not any sort of doubt as to whether GPL'd works are validly copyrighted). Since the work is copyrighted, we can require people who wish to copy the work to agree to our terms, whatever they are. We can require them to quack if we want.
If the GPL is not a valid grant of copy license, realize that means the works cannot be distributed at all. It's impossible for copyrighted works to enter the public domain before expiration unless the copyright owner allows it. The GPL is clearly not a statement of public-domain intentions.
If you violate the GPL and are sued, you can either admit that you agreed to the GPL or you can claim you didn't. If you did, we're out of copyright law (and so it doesn't matter what copyright law was designed for) and into contract law. In contract law, you largely don't have rights that you've agreed not to have; you agreed not to violate it when you agreed to it. If you claim you never agreed to the GPL, you're copying a copyrighted work without a license: old-fashioned copyright infringement. It doesn't even matter if the person who gave it to you in the first place violated the GPL and took the copyright notices off; it's still copyrighted (though the penalties would likely be smaller in that case). Copyright doesn't just magically disappear because someone uses it for something other than "you-give-me-money-I-give-you-software" material-world emulation.
well if at any point, the kernel simply locks cold and doesn't do anything, the journaling will work fine since it's prepared for the case of a power outage. If the kernel gets corrupted in some odd way but doesn't write to the disk again, the journal will also be fine. You are right that filesystem integrity could be damaged by a corrupted kernel that continued to operate; it would also be possible for such a beast to install Windows XP on all its filesystems, since in that case we are by definition in an undefined condition. I think it's generally unlikely for such a thing to happen, but it's certainly possible and it's happened before (well, maybe not the Windows XP part...)
Not really. It can be voluntary. Most sex sites would love to be in a .xxx domain.
The CMOS has never been SRAM. SRAM does not have to be refreshed like DRAM but it WILL lose data if subjected to a sustained power loss. The CMOS these days is Flash RAM; on older machines it was some form of ROM. SRAM is used in modern systems only for CPU and memory caches. SRAM is VERY fast, whereas flash and ROM are both slower than plain old DRAM.
Time? Give it TIME?
You don't read Freshmeat very often, do you?
The phrase "begging the question" has never meant "asking the question". "Begging the question" is a name for a specific logical fallacy. Please see http://skepdic.com/begging.html