I'm fairly certain that in no way could a MS salary be considered slave wages. Moreover, I've never heard anyone complain that they were treated poorly. Crappy, uninspiring, tedious work environment, sure, but nothing like EA's been accused of. MS has, at worst, put out mediocre products and leveraged their market share to ensure they remain dominant. Nothing too great or noteworthy about that (unless you're an investor), but not exactly goose-stepping baby eating either.
That could be because helping an entire continent of people survive pretty much more than makes up for sinking a business or 20 along the way. You can continue to sound the anti-MS horn as you please, but at some point it starts to sound more like holding a grudge than a legitimate complaint. Apparently most people, or "average clods" as you call them, believe that point is now.
How can that be when almost every computer already comes with the license.
Because not everyone buys a prefab system? I've bought four in my lifetime, and two of them were Commodores. The very first PC I bought, in 1997 when I finally decided my Amiga wouldn't cut it anymore after 8 years, I didn't know any better and I got a Compaq. Ever since then I've assembled my own -- at least 8 -- until this year when I bought my GF an HP laptop (so she'd stay the hell off of my computer).
Of course I've always bought a copy of Windows for each and every PC I've built. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
There are plenty of machines sold without Windows preinstalled on them, from offbrand systems, to DIY setups, to barebones systems. I'm not sure what portion of the market that covers, but it's substantial enough to keep many companies in business, and there's really no way to know what portion of those have authorized copies of XP installed. I've never seen any poll data, but I'm sure any poll is likely to be skewed. At any rate, I wouldn't dismiss the 25% number out of hand.
(Cisco is probably responsible for far more arrests than Yahoo!, but they don't get the same bad press because you can't point to specific instances where their monitoring tools have identified activists).
That's ridiculous. Creating a tool does not make the manufacturer liable for its misuse. But even if it did, it's a bit of a double standard to condemn them for providing tools used by a non-ally government to do the same things our own government is allegedly doing. Congress should be reinforcing protections at home before worrying about what happens abroad. Our own government reportedly uses internet dragnets such as Eschelon, and surveillance reciprocity (we'll spy on your citizens if you spy on ours). We have "free speech zones" where anyone who protests is a suspect and anyone who fails to comply is arrested.
In many EU countries it's illegal to deny the holocaust or sell Nazi artifacts, etc., but I don't see a public outcry about that (which, I might add, is the true measure of freedom of speech -- supporting the right for people to express things you disagree with, however vehemently).
Furthermore, we turn a blind eye to far more devastating (and much more easily defined) human rights violations of our allies, such as punative and/or preventative amuptations (cutting off a hand for theft; female circumcision), which makes this uproar over Cisco, Yahoo, and Google all the more ridiculous, superficial, and capricious.
Should we encourage countries to adopt the same standards that we (supposedly) hold for human rights? Absolutely. But we've only had things like women's suffrage for less than 90 years, and racial segregation was legal less than 50 years ago. It's not as if we have any sort of moral authority just because we recently changed our societial values. Especially when there's significant evidence that China is becoming more and more liberal about its citizenry, and when a free and open society is the logical consequence of the Internet, no matter how much the government may try to censor it. Basically it's no different than helping a boss with a decision you know will lead to his downfall -- you can try to tell him the consequences, but in the end it's his decision, and he's the boss. Censorship is a losing battle, because the harder you try to repress something, the more attention it gets. It's like yelling "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- it only piques people's suspicion/curiosity.
And, the alternative we haven't considered is the possibility that Chinese government really is more effective. While we are by far the wealthiest nation on earth (though not per capita by a long shot), we have significant problems of our own. Maybe keeping people in line gradeschool style really is beneficial to society as a whole. Asian culture abounds with the idea that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual, and China is simply an extreme example of that philosophy. Who the hell are we to tell them they're wrong? Because we have no crime, no hunger, no poverty? Our youth are content and optimistic, and our elderly are respected and comfortable? America is "the great experiment," and it's far from conclusive that our experiment will succeed. We've had civil war and great depression, concentration camps and foreign invasion, and on and on. We're really little more than very loud hypocrites.. do as we say, not as we do.
What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat[)]
It's difficult to say there's no expectation of reciprocity in most situations, since we know there's a socially implied expectation. If Steve buys you a lunch today, you're socially expected to return the favor when you can, and if you don't, Steve may well be offended, or at least disappointed, neither of which would be possible if there were no expectations to disappoint.
At any rate, I conceed that situations in which there's no reasonable expectation of the possibility of reciprocity would form a working definition of altruism; charities such as the Gates Foundation where there's really no way it could be argued that Bill would expect to see any real return on his time and money, nor does he need a return, nor would it better his quality of life even if he saw a return.
ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade.
The only actor that just seems to remind me of the first place I saw him is the dude who played Agent Smith in the Matrix. Whenever I watch LOTR that's just one of the things that ruins it for me.
Perhaps, but I'm going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson.
XP made them look like they weren't even trying. Vista at least shows there is some effort to it.
So you were running Windows ME until now? Granted, XP is functionally very similar to Windows 2000, but Win2k was intended for a corporate/enterprise networked environment. Anybody who tried to use it for games in the first few years should remember the horrible problem with drivers, and some drivers still don't work properly with Win2k to this day. XP was a monumental improvement on 98/ME.
Re:Where's the need come from?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Deserts exist mainly because there is no moisture in the air to be extracted, not because of a lack of extraction. Most deserts exist where mountains have essentially squeezed every last drop of water out of the air. I highly doubt that even with artificial extraction there would be enough water to sustain vegetation, let alone for it to sustain itself once the theoretical kickstart had completed. You'd really have to put these things several Km above the surface in order to reach moist air.
Re:sum zero gain
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, just a few counterpoints here..
water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?
Air can only hold a certain amount of water, known as the saturation point. Saturation is the reason water stops evaporating, not the speed of the evaporation process. That is to say, if the air is drier, evaporation will easily keep up to bring it back to the saturation point. The humidity will be replenished, unless the sun stops shining.
if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately.
Ok, this might be a topic best saved for a more advanced lesson, but water does not disappear once you drink it and/or bathe with it. All water eventually flows back to the sea. This was covered in such educational films as "Finding Nemo."
I hear they're going to make calculators that can fit in your pocket soon. Also, nuclear power plants will soon spring up across the country to provide electricity without smog and reduce the dependance on foreign imports!
The two things that struck me as terrible right off the bat were 1) The "lock" buttons in WMP and WMC (easily bypassed with CTRL-ALT-DEL -> Task Manager), and 2) The drivers (presumably) for my Hauppauge 500 card still make the picture look like utter crap. (Picture looks great if I boot into MCE2005, and I've changed the default MPEG-2 decoder, so I can only assume drivers are the issue.)
Additionally, I was not at all impressed by most of the changes to Media Center. Videos don't display the name until you select them. Whose bright idea was that? As if I could tell the date of a Colbert Report (or the content of any video, for that matter) just by looking at its thumbnail. Worse, the horizontal arrangement makes it less intuitive to navigate. And it still locks up frequently and gives two dialog boxes (which can't be controlled by the remote) before restarting after a significant delay. Just exiting gracefully and manually restarting, especially with the green button, would take less time.
I'm still using Vista on my HTPC, for now, but only so I can keep abreast of and test updates with minimal effort. I wouldn't dream of putting it on my main PC, or anyone else's in my house for that matter.
Actually I'm more impressed by their ability to come up with workable solutions to save power. Now if only they'd show me a viable alternative to running a water line to the location of my new GE fridge.
I have my own reasons and extenuating circumstances about why I decided to forfeit. A few of those reasons were explained in a previous post. It's not your job to understand my reasons. I don't expect most people to understand or accept them. I didn't LIKE to have to make this decision, but I know it's the RIGHT one for me and my family.
I nominate the author of the Agilent E2930B DDR Exerciser and Protocol Analyzer for PCI-X 1.0 and 2.0 manual. That part on unidirectional data path verification and real-time data comparison was simply... breathtaking. I felt like I was really there.
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I'm fairly certain that in no way could a MS salary be considered slave wages. Moreover, I've never heard anyone complain that they were treated poorly. Crappy, uninspiring, tedious work environment, sure, but nothing like EA's been accused of. MS has, at worst, put out mediocre products and leveraged their market share to ensure they remain dominant. Nothing too great or noteworthy about that (unless you're an investor), but not exactly goose-stepping baby eating either.
That could be because helping an entire continent of people survive pretty much more than makes up for sinking a business or 20 along the way. You can continue to sound the anti-MS horn as you please, but at some point it starts to sound more like holding a grudge than a legitimate complaint. Apparently most people, or "average clods" as you call them, believe that point is now.
how many people get stuck in an infinite loop of searching for google, then researching in the second search box where it tells you to search.
I have no idea, but Yahoo is welcome to keep those particular users.
-Google
How can that be when almost every computer already comes with the license.
Because not everyone buys a prefab system? I've bought four in my lifetime, and two of them were Commodores. The very first PC I bought, in 1997 when I finally decided my Amiga wouldn't cut it anymore after 8 years, I didn't know any better and I got a Compaq. Ever since then I've assembled my own -- at least 8 -- until this year when I bought my GF an HP laptop (so she'd stay the hell off of my computer).
Of course I've always bought a copy of Windows for each and every PC I've built. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
There are plenty of machines sold without Windows preinstalled on them, from offbrand systems, to DIY setups, to barebones systems. I'm not sure what portion of the market that covers, but it's substantial enough to keep many companies in business, and there's really no way to know what portion of those have authorized copies of XP installed. I've never seen any poll data, but I'm sure any poll is likely to be skewed. At any rate, I wouldn't dismiss the 25% number out of hand.
(Cisco is probably responsible for far more arrests than Yahoo!, but they don't get the same bad press because you can't point to specific instances where their monitoring tools have identified activists).
That's ridiculous. Creating a tool does not make the manufacturer liable for its misuse. But even if it did, it's a bit of a double standard to condemn them for providing tools used by a non-ally government to do the same things our own government is allegedly doing. Congress should be reinforcing protections at home before worrying about what happens abroad. Our own government reportedly uses internet dragnets such as Eschelon, and surveillance reciprocity (we'll spy on your citizens if you spy on ours). We have "free speech zones" where anyone who protests is a suspect and anyone who fails to comply is arrested.
In many EU countries it's illegal to deny the holocaust or sell Nazi artifacts, etc., but I don't see a public outcry about that (which, I might add, is the true measure of freedom of speech -- supporting the right for people to express things you disagree with, however vehemently).
Furthermore, we turn a blind eye to far more devastating (and much more easily defined) human rights violations of our allies, such as punative and/or preventative amuptations (cutting off a hand for theft; female circumcision), which makes this uproar over Cisco, Yahoo, and Google all the more ridiculous, superficial, and capricious.
Should we encourage countries to adopt the same standards that we (supposedly) hold for human rights? Absolutely. But we've only had things like women's suffrage for less than 90 years, and racial segregation was legal less than 50 years ago. It's not as if we have any sort of moral authority just because we recently changed our societial values. Especially when there's significant evidence that China is becoming more and more liberal about its citizenry, and when a free and open society is the logical consequence of the Internet, no matter how much the government may try to censor it. Basically it's no different than helping a boss with a decision you know will lead to his downfall -- you can try to tell him the consequences, but in the end it's his decision, and he's the boss. Censorship is a losing battle, because the harder you try to repress something, the more attention it gets. It's like yelling "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- it only piques people's suspicion/curiosity.
And, the alternative we haven't considered is the possibility that Chinese government really is more effective. While we are by far the wealthiest nation on earth (though not per capita by a long shot), we have significant problems of our own. Maybe keeping people in line gradeschool style really is beneficial to society as a whole. Asian culture abounds with the idea that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual, and China is simply an extreme example of that philosophy. Who the hell are we to tell them they're wrong? Because we have no crime, no hunger, no poverty? Our youth are content and optimistic, and our elderly are respected and comfortable? America is "the great experiment," and it's far from conclusive that our experiment will succeed. We've had civil war and great depression, concentration camps and foreign invasion, and on and on. We're really little more than very loud hypocrites.. do as we say, not as we do.
What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat[)]
It's difficult to say there's no expectation of reciprocity in most situations, since we know there's a socially implied expectation. If Steve buys you a lunch today, you're socially expected to return the favor when you can, and if you don't, Steve may well be offended, or at least disappointed, neither of which would be possible if there were no expectations to disappoint.
At any rate, I conceed that situations in which there's no reasonable expectation of the possibility of reciprocity would form a working definition of altruism; charities such as the Gates Foundation where there's really no way it could be argued that Bill would expect to see any real return on his time and money, nor does he need a return, nor would it better his quality of life even if he saw a return.
ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade.
I thought the Large Binocular Telescope was already doing that, producing images 10 times sharper than Hubble.
The only actor that just seems to remind me of the first place I saw him is the dude who played Agent Smith in the Matrix. Whenever I watch LOTR that's just one of the things that ruins it for me.
Perhaps, but I'm going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson.
...confusion about what exactly Second Life is persists pretty much everywhere.
Boring.
Now that we've cleared that up...
Good point.
XP made them look like they weren't even trying. Vista at least shows there is some effort to it.
So you were running Windows ME until now? Granted, XP is functionally very similar to Windows 2000, but Win2k was intended for a corporate/enterprise networked environment. Anybody who tried to use it for games in the first few years should remember the horrible problem with drivers, and some drivers still don't work properly with Win2k to this day. XP was a monumental improvement on 98/ME.
Deserts exist mainly because there is no moisture in the air to be extracted, not because of a lack of extraction. Most deserts exist where mountains have essentially squeezed every last drop of water out of the air. I highly doubt that even with artificial extraction there would be enough water to sustain vegetation, let alone for it to sustain itself once the theoretical kickstart had completed. You'd really have to put these things several Km above the surface in order to reach moist air.
Okay, just a few counterpoints here..
water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?
Air can only hold a certain amount of water, known as the saturation point. Saturation is the reason water stops evaporating, not the speed of the evaporation process. That is to say, if the air is drier, evaporation will easily keep up to bring it back to the saturation point. The humidity will be replenished, unless the sun stops shining.
if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately.
Ok, this might be a topic best saved for a more advanced lesson, but water does not disappear once you drink it and/or bathe with it. All water eventually flows back to the sea. This was covered in such educational films as "Finding Nemo."
I hear they're going to make calculators that can fit in your pocket soon. Also, nuclear power plants will soon spring up across the country to provide electricity without smog and reduce the dependance on foreign imports!
The two things that struck me as terrible right off the bat were 1) The "lock" buttons in WMP and WMC (easily bypassed with CTRL-ALT-DEL -> Task Manager), and 2) The drivers (presumably) for my Hauppauge 500 card still make the picture look like utter crap. (Picture looks great if I boot into MCE2005, and I've changed the default MPEG-2 decoder, so I can only assume drivers are the issue.)
Additionally, I was not at all impressed by most of the changes to Media Center. Videos don't display the name until you select them. Whose bright idea was that? As if I could tell the date of a Colbert Report (or the content of any video, for that matter) just by looking at its thumbnail. Worse, the horizontal arrangement makes it less intuitive to navigate. And it still locks up frequently and gives two dialog boxes (which can't be controlled by the remote) before restarting after a significant delay. Just exiting gracefully and manually restarting, especially with the green button, would take less time.
I'm still using Vista on my HTPC, for now, but only so I can keep abreast of and test updates with minimal effort. I wouldn't dream of putting it on my main PC, or anyone else's in my house for that matter.
Actually I'm more impressed by their ability to come up with workable solutions to save power. Now if only they'd show me a viable alternative to running a water line to the location of my new GE fridge.
That's Potassium Valley to you!
Personal pleasure doesn't even enter into it, and can't, because...you are always doing things for some sort of personal pleasure.
So by "not entering into it," you mean "is the single biggest reason people do anything." Got it.
now that Microsoft has a console, we are supposed to stop gaming on PCs?
Nope. Apparently you haven't heard about Microsoft's efforts to revitalize PC gaming. Well, now you have.
...not as infatuated with Apple's products as America.
Look, you euro-prude, iPods are SHINY! Apple clearly knows how to give us what we wa.. ohhhh, shiny!
I realize I may be alone here, but I'm sick and tired of Georgians proposing social sites, and I'm all for placing restrictions on them!
Better yet, they could hire him as a waiter on the flight and only pay him $2.13/hr.
I nominate the author of the Agilent E2930B DDR Exerciser and Protocol Analyzer for PCI-X 1.0 and 2.0 manual. That part on unidirectional data path verification and real-time data comparison was simply... breathtaking. I felt like I was really there.
do wire shorts smell in space?
I don't think it matters where they are if they don't have a nose.
I'm so sorry for that.