Then admittedly, it still has some way to go in both price and performance, but at the current rate, I expect this capacity to hit the 200 mark within one year, not two.
I've also spend some time reading their forum and I'd say it's part joke/part game/part serious. Basically, you can pick either side of the argument and try to defend/attack it using only logic.
The funny thing is, that the people with the least skills in logic/debate are the most vicious. If you're sure about your own belief in fundamental science, you can have a good time defending either side.
Try this: The photolab part of the Cern Document server, search query Maximilien Brice. The 'large' photos are quite large, but register for the high-res versions:
Those are some pretty valid reasons, if you ask me. I would just suggest to give it another go, if you decide on the macbook. It won me over in about a week. On the other hand, if you're that comfortable with your existing desktop setup, it probably won't make a difference.
You hit the nail on the head with this not being a EULA issue, it's indeed a copyright issue and the car analogy actually does work here:
There are a number of 'tuning' companies in Europe, who take existing BMW, Merc, Audi models and completely adjust them to outperform the originals in every way. However, unless they get explicit permission from the manufacturer to use their name, they must remove all branding (badges, model names, etc.). If they would put these 'clones' on the market with original branding, they would be sued and lose.
Sorry, I just have to ask this: Why are you formatting and installing OSX? Professionally, I'm a hardcore linux user, but I really can't see the merits of using linux as a desktop OS over OSX. Is it the principle or actual usability issues? I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm genuinely curious.
Only half kidding. No, really. Think about it. If they want us to believe that Vista has ended the need for XP, then they should have no fear opensourcing it, as it no longer represents any substantial value (except for those parts which were handed down to Vista, which can remain closed).
You know, that actually was somewhat interesting. At least infinitely more so than most blogs. In fact, I see no real difference between this writeup and almost every Douglas Coupland novel.
This is a pretty cool tech demo, but at the moment, its battlefield utility is zero. That two-stroke engine buzz is going to alert every bad guy for miles around. You assume that they'll use it for stealth operations. Not everything on the battlefield needs to be stealth. A tank is pretty noisy, still, it has it's place. For example, in a forrest situation, you might be able to hear it, but you won't see it until it's in a line of sight. And then it's a matter of your reaction speed versus that of a robot. Also, you could simply flood a battlefield with these things - think thousands - and give them all an explosive payload. You just got yourself a thousand kamikaze dogs (or more accurately, locomotive claymores).
Obviously, this way of launching spacecraft from earth will never be accepted by the general public, no matter how small the actual contamination may turn out to be. But would it not be possible to confine the nuclear reaction itself and still generate enough energy to get into orbit? Probably not, the loss in conversion would no doubt be too high, as well as the weight of the containment structure. My best is still the space elevator, even though it relies on materials which haven't even been developed. Once you've lifted tonnes of material into space, you can construct your nuclear spacecraft there, no problem.
Like WHAT - INSIGHT? Good luck with that Butch, lemme know how it works out for ya. Moron. You're actually onto something here. More often than not, after studying some field or specific subject for days, digging through piles of documentation and reading between lines, I am able to explain the same matter to somebody completely new to the subject within minutes. For some reason, the effectiveness of conveying knowledge from person to person, and thereby providing a common starting point for further research, varies greatly.
From time to time, you encounter a/. comment which clearly and concisely explains very hard subject matter. The same goes for certain Wikipedia articles. Maybe we should focus on a common form factor (not unlike usability standards) to make subject more easily understandable.
I see two immediate problems with this: 1) Not everybody is able or willing to explain something they have discovered with much effort in layman's terms. 2) Some matter is simply to complex or nuanced to be explained effectively in natural language. I've seen people try and fail to explain quantum mechanics to the general public many times.
In the end, insight is the result of studying a field. But these days, we can't expect everyone to be an expert in every possible field.
Problem is it's far cheaper to let the people use the pump themselves. Why put in a multi thousand dollar robot to do something that people are doing for free. Which is why we call this a 'service' or 'added value'. You can also service your own car. However, some people would pay to have other people do that for them.
At full service stations the "attendant" is paid minimum wage as it's not a skilled job. I can pay the wages of a gas pump attendant for 10 years for the price of one gas pumping robot. Where do you live, India? In most (all) European countries there's a minimum wage for any kind of job. If you pay the attendant 6 bucks an hour (assuming someone working 24 hours, no downtime, no other employees and no other perks - dental, health), it would take you only 2 years to break even on this. Assuming an operational life of 5 years, this machine would save the owner about 150K on an attendant.
You are using a very mixed bag of confusing arguments, without properly supporting your claim that this form of tax is "fair". A few criticisms:
Let's talk for a moment about "fairness". A person doing hot tar roofing earns $9 an hour. Tiger Woods earns $171 a minute for playing golf. Stephen Spielberg earns $632 a minute. Paris Hilton is set for life for doing absolutely nothing of value. Is that a fair rewarding of labor?
1) The person doing hot tar roofing could have chosen to do something else if the market aks for a different skill set. This is free market and a nice incentive for free education. By the way, where I come from (the Netherlands) builders/plumbers/roof-workers etc., quite often have a higer income than engineers, precisely because of they are sparse. 2) Both Tiger Woods and Steven Spielberg have worked extremely hard for little or no pay at all before they reached the threshold needed to become international stars. Also, they have taken a great risk as they could well both have become under achievers in the field of sports and arts, which aren't exactly reliable income sources. 3) Paris Hilton has inherited her fortune, which is completely irrelevant to your argument, even though her family has performed extremely successful for generations to achieve this.
So to answer your rhetorical question: yes this is a fair rewarding.
We live in a (mostly) free market economy, and that's generally a good thing. It means that we pay for goods what they're worth. It means we strive to reduce subsidy and get mad when we see it in some form or another. It tends to lead to optimal use of resources. All of this is great, except that it treats people just like another good.
4) No, it treats the value which they can add to a product or service as just another good. The person is not equal to the service he or she provides. Treating people as goods would be slave-trade.
The hot tar worker is like sand, available on the cheap, while Tiger Woods and Spielberg are like gold. They're rare, so the market pays more for them, exponentially more, obscenely more.
5) This is starting to sound communist. The market (or us, the people) paying exponentially more for the services of some other people is obscene? How, exactly? Is it offensive or disgusting to others? Does people earning 1000 times more than we insult us? I don't think so, it doesn't bother me at all that there are internet billionaires.
Wages in a free market economy are naturally distributed along an "L" curve. This isn't "fair" in terms of the amount of labor people put in (or even how "smart" they are, or how much risk they were willing to take), but the free market doesn't care about "fairness". It doesn't care about anything. To it, people are just goods.
6) Why is this distribution not "fair", exactly? What would be fair? An even distribution of wages? According to the hours put in? That wouldn't work as it takes away incentive for excellence, as has been shown by many communist societies. 7) Are you willing to factor in how "smart" (I'm using your brackets there) people are and what risk they're willing to take? Good, because I am saying that is exactly what the free market does. Or do you believe that there is some other secret factor at work here? Which one would that be? I am willing to say that luck has something to do with it, as the market needs some time to settle on new incentives.
Now, while wages may be distributed exponentially, human needs are not.
8) So, you are saying that human needs are distributed evenly? That's not true. A person on lifelong medical care needs a lot more than a healthy person. I would even call their needs exponentially higher than mine.
A poor person, buying necessities, has no money left over for luxury. A wealthy person simply cannot buy enough necessities to even dent their luxury budget. And if they did buy necessities for other people, that
because of what I was carrying around
My needs have changed Are we secretely talking about how you lost weight and thus no longer need this enormous SUV? If so, for a 10 mile commute, maybe you should consider taking a bicycle instead and lose even more. By the end of this year, you would be riding a unicycle to work! On the other hand, I go to the gym by car, so I'm not really setting an example here...
At midnight, on the 12th of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Enceladus and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way. And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A flare, spurting out from Enceladus. Bright green, drawing a green mist behind it; a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. Ogilby, the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no living thing on that remote, forbidding planet.
America is a big, old, resilient creature. Old? If by America you mean the continent, then ok. But if you mean the US, then I'll have you know that even the Dutch National Lottery is older than that, and more resilient (has always been making a steady profit).
There is an interesting novel which explores this very idea. Ofcourse, this is only one take on what happens when the brains of a civilisation go on strike.
Wouldn't this make AT&T's "exclusive" distribution agreement written on toilet paper? Everyone who didn't want get a long contract or use AT&T would just get the iPhone imported from Europe. You're confusing a formal agreement with enforcing limitations on use. Any technical limitation could be easily circumvented, as I can have a simlock removed in nearly any telecom store in the EU. This is not Apple's problem, as long as they're not actively encouraging it. There's no way of stopping black market trade anyway. Selling it in the EU without a simlock while still stating it only be used by EU customers should be enough.
A more interesting question would be what Apple is going to do in those countries where it is illegal to lock a phone to a network or require a contract for it. I know of no country in the EU where this is the case, although it may very well exist. On the other hand, I also haven't heard of a EU country enforcing the EULA ban on removing a sim-lock. This would in fact be very hard (if not impossible) in many countries.
If there's going to be any "revolution" in the cell phone industry caused by the iPhone, it's how business is done U.S. cellular industry when the rest of the world is entirely different. I can't believe we still have to pay for incoming calls in the U.S. I don't think it's that different from other phones released by the regular manufacturers. Also, not having to pay for incoming calls only works within borders. When you start roaming, you usually do pay for incoming calls. Considering small countries like the Netherlands, this is very impractical.
Since I have owned nearly every phone in the Sony Ericsson Kxxi series, I can comment that the battery life, reception and durability of these have actually increased with every new release. Although the first one is probably due to the developments in battery design, not energy saving features. I get a good 3-4 days of standby time on my K800i and enough hours of call-time to last me through the day (and as this is my primary business line, so it is used a *lot*). So there you go...
Alternatively, you could just ask him to send you an open suitcase to which only he has the key/combination. You'd then return the closed suitcase with the key inside to him, which saves you some postage. Admittedly, this wouldn't help the authentication problem (how do you know it's his suitcase and how does he know that the key is yours?) We could expand on this, but the metaphors are getting the best of me.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the current OCZ crop:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227345
Then admittedly, it still has some way to go in both price and performance, but at the current rate, I expect this capacity to hit the 200 mark within one year, not two.
I've also spend some time reading their forum and I'd say it's part joke/part game/part serious. Basically, you can pick either side of the argument and try to defend/attack it using only logic.
The funny thing is, that the people with the least skills in logic/debate are the most vicious. If you're sure about your own belief in fundamental science, you can have a good time defending either side.
Try this: The photolab part of the Cern Document server, search query Maximilien Brice. The 'large' photos are quite large, but register for the high-res versions:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search?ln=en&cc=CERN+PhotoLab&sc=1&p=Maximilien+Brice&f=&action_search=Search
Those are some pretty valid reasons, if you ask me. I would just suggest to give it another go, if you decide on the macbook. It won me over in about a week. On the other hand, if you're that comfortable with your existing desktop setup, it probably won't make a difference.
You hit the nail on the head with this not being a EULA issue, it's indeed a copyright issue and the car analogy actually does work here:
There are a number of 'tuning' companies in Europe, who take existing BMW, Merc, Audi models and completely adjust them to outperform the originals in every way. However, unless they get explicit permission from the manufacturer to use their name, they must remove all branding (badges, model names, etc.). If they would put these 'clones' on the market with original branding, they would be sued and lose.
Sorry, I just have to ask this: Why are you formatting and installing OSX? Professionally, I'm a hardcore linux user, but I really can't see the merits of using linux as a desktop OS over OSX. Is it the principle or actual usability issues? I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm genuinely curious.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/2036213
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Stupid_Johnson
no, really
Only half kidding. No, really. Think about it. If they want us to believe that Vista has ended the need for XP, then they should have no fear opensourcing it, as it no longer represents any substantial value (except for those parts which were handed down to Vista, which can remain closed).
ID Software does it, so why not Microsoft?
You know, that actually was somewhat interesting. At least infinitely more so than most blogs. In fact, I see no real difference between this writeup and almost every Douglas Coupland novel.
Obviously, this way of launching spacecraft from earth will never be accepted by the general public, no matter how small the actual contamination may turn out to be. But would it not be possible to confine the nuclear reaction itself and still generate enough energy to get into orbit? Probably not, the loss in conversion would no doubt be too high, as well as the weight of the containment structure. My best is still the space elevator, even though it relies on materials which haven't even been developed. Once you've lifted tonnes of material into space, you can construct your nuclear spacecraft there, no problem.
From time to time, you encounter a
I see two immediate problems with this: 1) Not everybody is able or willing to explain something they have discovered with much effort in layman's terms. 2) Some matter is simply to complex or nuanced to be explained effectively in natural language. I've seen people try and fail to explain quantum mechanics to the general public many times.
In the end, insight is the result of studying a field. But these days, we can't expect everyone to be an expert in every possible field.
...I'm busy watching my 2-disc Blu-ray anniversary edition directors' cut of "The Net", in glorious 8.3 surround. Oh, Sandra, you're so knowledgeable.
Let's talk for a moment about "fairness". A person doing hot tar roofing earns $9 an hour. Tiger Woods earns $171 a minute for playing golf. Stephen Spielberg earns $632 a minute. Paris Hilton is set for life for doing absolutely nothing of value. Is that a fair rewarding of labor?
1) The person doing hot tar roofing could have chosen to do something else if the market aks for a different skill set. This is free market and a nice incentive for free education. By the way, where I come from (the Netherlands) builders/plumbers/roof-workers etc., quite often have a higer income than engineers, precisely because of they are sparse.
2) Both Tiger Woods and Steven Spielberg have worked extremely hard for little or no pay at all before they reached the threshold needed to become international stars. Also, they have taken a great risk as they could well both have become under achievers in the field of sports and arts, which aren't exactly reliable income sources.
3) Paris Hilton has inherited her fortune, which is completely irrelevant to your argument, even though her family has performed extremely successful for generations to achieve this.
So to answer your rhetorical question: yes this is a fair rewarding.
We live in a (mostly) free market economy, and that's generally a good thing. It means that we pay for goods what they're worth. It means we strive to reduce subsidy and get mad when we see it in some form or another. It tends to lead to optimal use of resources. All of this is great, except that it treats people just like another good.
4) No, it treats the value which they can add to a product or service as just another good. The person is not equal to the service he or she provides. Treating people as goods would be slave-trade.
The hot tar worker is like sand, available on the cheap, while Tiger Woods and Spielberg are like gold. They're rare, so the market pays more for them, exponentially more, obscenely more.
5) This is starting to sound communist. The market (or us, the people) paying exponentially more for the services of some other people is obscene? How, exactly? Is it offensive or disgusting to others? Does people earning 1000 times more than we insult us? I don't think so, it doesn't bother me at all that there are internet billionaires.
Wages in a free market economy are naturally distributed along an "L" curve. This isn't "fair" in terms of the amount of labor people put in (or even how "smart" they are, or how much risk they were willing to take), but the free market doesn't care about "fairness". It doesn't care about anything. To it, people are just goods.
6) Why is this distribution not "fair", exactly? What would be fair? An even distribution of wages? According to the hours put in? That wouldn't work as it takes away incentive for excellence, as has been shown by many communist societies.
7) Are you willing to factor in how "smart" (I'm using your brackets there) people are and what risk they're willing to take? Good, because I am saying that is exactly what the free market does. Or do you believe that there is some other secret factor at work here? Which one would that be? I am willing to say that luck has something to do with it, as the market needs some time to settle on new incentives.
Now, while wages may be distributed exponentially, human needs are not.
8) So, you are saying that human needs are distributed evenly? That's not true. A person on lifelong medical care needs a lot more than a healthy person. I would even call their needs exponentially higher than mine.
A poor person, buying necessities, has no money left over for luxury. A wealthy person simply cannot buy enough necessities to even dent their luxury budget. And if they did buy necessities for other people, that
At midnight, on the 12th of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Enceladus and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way.
And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A flare, spurting out from Enceladus. Bright green, drawing a green mist behind it; a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. Ogilby, the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no living thing on that remote, forbidding planet.
But if you mean the US, then I'll have you know that even the Dutch National Lottery is older than that, and more resilient (has always been making a steady profit).
There is an interesting novel which explores this very idea. Ofcourse, this is only one take on what happens when the brains of a civilisation go on strike.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged
I've had mixed results with my powerbook. It works best with the delicate or wool program. Just stay away from the tumble dryer and steam cleaning.
Since I have owned nearly every phone in the Sony Ericsson Kxxi series, I can comment that the battery life, reception and durability of these have actually increased with every new release. Although the first one is probably due to the developments in battery design, not energy saving features. I get a good 3-4 days of standby time on my K800i and enough hours of call-time to last me through the day (and as this is my primary business line, so it is used a *lot*). So there you go...
Alternatively, you could just ask him to send you an open suitcase to which only he has the key/combination. You'd then return the closed suitcase with the key inside to him, which saves you some postage. Admittedly, this wouldn't help the authentication problem (how do you know it's his suitcase and how does he know that the key is yours?) We could expand on this, but the metaphors are getting the best of me.