Actually (and if you go up a ways in the thread, somebody links to the Apple TIL explaining it) modern Macs do a "sleep+suspend" at the same time. When they go to sleep, they also write the contents of RAM to a file on the disk. This way if you deplete the battery in standby, or if you remove the battery for some reason, when you power it up next, it does a wake-from-suspend rather than a complete reboot.
I don't have a Mac that's new enough to support it (my aging iBook G3 definitely doesn't) but it seems like a neat compromise feature, particularly when you consider that a Mac in standby is good for more than a week. If you're not going to use it for longer than that, hardly seems worth doing anything besides really shutting it down.
That's a very difficult question to even attempt to answer. As soon as somebody might attempt to produce a statistic showing one way or the other, the validity of that statistic could be questioned on the grounds of structural racism.
It's impossible to get statistics about who commits more crimes by race, because we don't necessarily even know how many crimes are being committed, and we don't necessarily catch the perpetrator (or even visualize them closely enough to ascertain their race). The closest you could get would be the percentage or number of people arrested for crimes by race, or convicted, or incarcerated.
Most of those statistics (the ones I've ever seen) show a disproportionate number of minorities -- particularly black males -- being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. One commonly cited figure is the percentage of black men incarcerated vs white men. But this is not necessarily equal to the number of crimes committed, since it assumes that a white and black person have the same odds, after committing a crime, of being caught, arrested, successfully prosecuted and convicted, and sentenced to prison. This is where various aspects of alleged structural racism -- intentional or not -- come into play. Questions arise about the different types of crimes and law enforcement attention paid to them, and which are more likely to be committed by each group, plus different punishments for each. Example: given two people with an equivalent amount of powder cocaine and crack cocaine -- crack being less expensive and more popular with minorities in cities -- the crack has far stiffer penalties for possession per gram.
There have been studies done where people of different races did similar activities (sat outside a fast food joint, in the one I saw), in the same locations, and could consistently be assured of more police attention if they were a minority. While not entirely convincing, it provides some weight to theories that minorities are under more police scrutiny and are thus more likely to get caught in a similar crime (say property crime) than a non-minority.
In the end, it gets so tangled that it's basically impossible to say with certainty that any particular 'race' is more or less likely to commit a crime (and then we can go back and forth on whether races actually exist in any quantifiable way). What does seem to be almost common sense though, are that some 'racial' minority groups tend to live in areas where crime exists at a higher rate than in areas inhabited by majority-group members. Though this would tend to suggest that they are more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of crimes (by virtue of proximity), the relationship isn't necessarily causative -- there's no evidence (that I've ever seen) that would substantiate calling the minority groups the source of the crime per se, or that if they were replaced by a socioeconomically similar but 'racially' different group, that the net outcomes would be different.
Looking around the world, I see societies with fewer social and economic problems, and which consequently have less crime, and I see societies with more social and economic problems, and more crime. Frankly, it seems quite independent of gun control laws.
Comparing Europe to the U.S. and saying that the difference in crime rates is due to gun control is naive and intellectually dishonest -- it neglects the vast social, economic, and cultural differences between places. Given the lack of effect of gun control measures at preventing crime within the United States -- which is far closer to a 'controlled experiment' than comparing the U.S. to another country -- I think it's far more likely that the crime in the U.S. has its origins elsewhere.
Your logic seems very fishy to me. Your whole argument seems to hinge on the difference between the First Amendment's use of a semicolon and the Second Amendment's use of a comma.
Consider the Second:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
It seems quite clear to me that the first phrase is a justification for the right about to be conferred. If the right was meant to be limited to the militia, why use "the people"? There is no other place in the Constitution where "the people" is used to confer a right on a particular subgroup of people. As has been pointed out many times, if the right was really meant to apply only to members of such an organized militia, why use that wording? Why not say 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms...'? The fact that this was not the phrasing chosen, and that "the people" was invoked specifically (as it is in other Amendments, where it has been clearly interpreted as referring to all citizens at the very least) seems quite clear.
You're correct there's no semicolon between "...state" and "the right...", but there cannot be, since the first part would be a dangling phrase. Perhaps for clarity, a different verb tense should have been chosen ("A well regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state; therefore the right of the people...") but one can hardly criticize the authors for wanting to maintain consistency with the tense of the rest of the document. The chosen wording is succinct, and when read in conjunction with the rest of the document's use of the term "the people," quite unambiguous. The minimalist interpretation you espouse would be quite ridiculous (disastrous, even) if applied elsewhere, there's no reason to single out the Second.
Also, your anecdotes about New York City as misleading at best. New York City has had a handgun ban for decades, and only recently has become relatively safe -- for a very long time, while the ban was in effect, it was extremely dangerous. That the City is now safe owes very little to the handgun ban, and far more to the increased resources devoted to policing in recent years, combined with economic and social trends. There's no causation there between 'gun ban' and 'crime decrease,' since the two events didn't follow each other. If a handgun ban really was the ticket to safety, then it would have happened right after the ban -- but it didn't.
I think it's also worth pointing out that in addition to Open Carry (which I have never seen anyone in Fairfax doing, and I think would probably turn some heads -- although I'm glad the police are aware of the law in this regard) Fairfax has the same Concealed Carry law as the rest of Virginia. Once you have a permit (which is "Shall Issue," basically the State is obligated to issue you a permit unless there is a reason to prohibit you from having one, on application) you can carry a handgun on your person, concealed.
I suspect that the number of people carrying concealed handguns in Fairfax is far larger than the number of people carrying openly.
The interesting thing about Baltimore being #2, and D.C. #3 or #4 this year is that everyone got bumped down a notch because Memphis came from behind at the last minute to steal the crown as Most Dangerous; D.C. or Baltimore didn't really do anything different.
Although (and I live right outside DC, FYI) a lot of people here took this as some sort of good thing, it doesn't mean that the District got any safer necessarily, it just means that some other places got dramatically worse.
Pretty much everybody I know has a "crazy District story" involving close proximity to someone who was being shot/stabbed/mugged, and there has definitely not been any dramatic improvement there lately (in fact, if anything it's gotten worse, with previously 'safe' areas becoming more dangerous). When there is a particularly high-profile incident in a revenue-generating area of the city (Farragut, Georgetown, etc.) there will be a lot of additional police presence there for a while -- classic security theater -- in order to keep people from doing their drinking elsewhere, but nothing really changes. (And if you do get yourself shot, beaten, or stabbed in the District, you can look forward the ineptitude of the EMS service; truly a winning combination.)
That example sounds more to me like a reason why you should have off-site storage of all your email. By mandating that your employees use web services for their email and IM (which is also covered by SOX, IIRC) you can make sure that things aren't scattered all over mailservers in various locations, or on end-user machines where they're not subject to expiry rules.
Maybe not a "consumer-grade" service like GMail, sure, but that doesn't mean web services are out, it just means there's a market for web-delivered services that have guaranteed uptimes and data security guarantees (perhaps they're bonded).
Lots of companies are required to be compliant with SOX and other documentation rules, but don't have the resources to do all the management that's required to do it properly. In many cases, they're just cruising along, hoping they don't get audited. Being able to offload that responsibility to a third party (with the appropriate credentials and guarantees, and the requisite cost) would not be as unpopular as I think you think it would be.
Lots of companies push paper records storage and management out to companies like Iron Mountain; there's no reason why they wouldn't do the same thing with data.
Assuming the ISP offers a good relay service, it shouldn't even matter.
That's kinda the issue though, isn't it? I'm not sure that's a safe assumption, since a lot of ISPs haven't been upgrading their email infrastructure to deal with increased loads in the past few years, it seems.
The main downside to Li-Polymer is that it is less efficient by volume and weight.
This, I think, is not true. LiIons may be more efficient by volume, but LiPos are almost certainly more efficient per weight, because they don't have the cells, or many of the protection mechanisms that LiIon batteries have to have.
The power/weight advantage is why they're used in applications where weight is more important than volume -- R/C aircraft, for instance. When LiPo batteries came out, they basically replaced NiCads and LiIon batteries overnight in most ultralight aircraft and helis, because they're just so much lighter (meaning that if you had an aircraft designed for NiCads, which wasn't atypical, you could get ridiculous flight time by upgrading to LiPoly cells).
But being more efficient per volume, that I could definitely believe.
The other big advantage I have heard is that with LiPo, you don't have to encase the batteries as heavily, so more of the weight and volume can actually be taken up with electricity-storing components, instead of as an 'exoskeleton' providing protection for the cells.
Except that I believe that you can't use many of the advanced features of the GPU because it currently lacks Linux drivers.
Also, at least as of a while ago, Linux didn't take advantage of all the SPUs within Cell; I'd hope that the Sony kernel modules mentioned in this article solve that problem, but I'm not sure.
This has little to do with IP laws they were simply looking for a way so they don't have to pay the $20 per a player fee to the DVD group to handle the royalties on the codecs.
This is China, right? Since when have they cared about things like royalties or others' intellectual property?
I suspect that if they wanted to make DVD players without paying the $20 fee, they'd just make DVD players, not pay the fee, and sell them within China.
I think this is more about producing a format within China that won't be adopted by the rest of the world, allowing the Chinese government more control over the media its people watch.
I do agree, though, we need to restore balance to the system, and that means either tarrifs, or subsidies. Both of these approaches have some pretty severe shortfalls. It's like tasering someone who's slashed their wrists to prevent them from committing suicide.
You're quite right that most of his post was nonsensical, but I think that he does have an important, if not exactly salient, point about U.S. and foreign competition.
The U.S. just can't compete based on price with a lot of countries in Asia. They have a huge labor pool (granted much of it is living in poverty and squalor) and are going to be able to underbid U.S. workers every single time. There's no way to compete with that, because it's not a level playing field.
In the U.S., if you run a factory, you have to follow OSHA regulations, you have strict maximums on work-day length, you may have to deal with unions, pay hefty taxes (OASDI, etc.), and you'll have to pay a competitive salary to your workers. Contrast this with some place in Asia. Not only is the "competitive salary" far lower, but there's virtually no safety regulation or worker's-protection laws to speak of, at least nothing like they are in the U.S., and if your employees start fussing about unions, you can just fire them all and hire a new batch from those practically beating down your front gate looking for work. That we have any industry at all left in the United States is pretty amazing. But it's a losing game. No matter now efficiently you run your factory here in the U.S., no matter how much you automate and how far you slash your workforce, eventually those advances in production are going to trickle over to the Asian factories, and they're going to apply them to their production lines, combine them with the cheap labor and lack of taxes and regulatory frameworks, and undercut you.
There are a few ways this can play out. Either all the countries in Asia can adopt U.S./Western-style regulations on industry -- highly unlikely, because the people running the show there are getting quite rich as it is, so why would they want to? Or the U.S. can regress to the situation that dominates in Asia in order to compete on price. That would entail a huge drop in our quality of life here; probably back to conditions that most people haven't seen since the early part of last century.
The third option is that we forcibly level the playing field. We apply import tariffs to goods made in countries with more lax laws and labor surpluses, in order to put it on a more equal footing with efficiently-run domestic operations. If we want to maintain our quality of life, we're going to have to take drastic steps to stop the hemorrhaging. Right now, we're financing our society's lifestyle on debt, and that's not sustainable.
We have one of the largest goods markets in the world, and we're letting firms sell to that market and destroy domestic industry, who don't have to play by the same rules, and in some cases, whose parent countries don't even allow U.S. firms the same access. There's no logic there, and I've seen no evidence that it's going to bring us to anything but ruin in the long run.
It makes a lot of offshoring more difficult, too. A lot of callcenter operations use VOIP in order to connect the center back to the U.S. Lack of VoIP could really change the balance of advantages away from BTO stuff in India. (Perhaps in favor of the Philippines or some other Asian countries with substantial English-speaking populations.) I can't imagine anyone choosing to use the POTS system if they didn't have to, particularly if the load is basically constant and predictable.
Can't say I'm disappointed. If the Indians want to shoot themselves in the foot, they can have at it.
I'd have no problem at all paying for each of my cable TV channels individually, on a per-month basis, for commercial-free entertainment. Of course, I'd probably only subscribe to five or six channels, but that's all I'd want or watch anyway. I have no interest in receiving 200 channels of television, I'm forced to get them in order to get a small number of channels I do want.
If customers refuse to watch commercials, and either start skipping them with DVRs or only watch downloaded TV that doesn't contain them in the first place, the networks will just have to figure out a business model that actually gives people a product they want, and gives it to them at a price they're willing to pay.
Just because it's 'the way it's done' now, doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. There's money to be made in entertainment; advertising isn't the only way to do it. When people get fed up with advertising, the entertainment companies who want to stay in business will find an alternative method to make money.
Yeah that was my first thought, too. I hope that whoever ends up buying them, will at least loan them out to a museum where they can be properly protected and exhibited.
I can't blame the person who found the Edison lightbulbs in their attic for wanting to sell, though, considering what they're probably worth.
Uh huh. Which is why all those people in Europe are forced to live our their worthless, depressed, miserable lives in torment; their spirits broken because they've seen so many naked people when they were growing up.
Get real. Our culture doesn't need porn to turn our kids into shallow, vapid little bastards; it does that perfectly fine with nothing but what can be shown on network TV. At the same time, it's quite easy to find sexual imagery in other parts of the world, and by all measurable parameters, children and adolescents have healthier attitudes to sex and relationships, have fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer abortions.
Porn is only bad when it's a young person's only exposure to sexuality. When the only breasts you ever see are Pamela Anderson's, and your only source for relationship advice is Snoop Dogg, it's no wonder that kids get screwy ideas. The problem isn't that they've seen Pamela's boobs or listened to Snoop Dogg On Dating, but that they haven't heard or seen healthy examples that answer the questions they're asking and what they want to know.
What's harmful to children is the attitude behind much censorship, which is basically that "sexuality is bad, and shouldn't be talked about." It's that silence on the part of parents and our culture in general, that would make kids watch porn and think that it's somehow representative of real life. A child who knows and understands what healthy relationships are supposed to entail, and also knows what porn is, and what it isn't, isn't going to be damaged by seeing it.
The problem isn't the porn. The problem is that we're incapable of talking about the porn.
Isn't this something that a globally enforced.XXX domain name for erotica and.MAT for mature would fix?
Yep. Of course, after the nuclear war and super-smallpox epidemic that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population, I don't think people will be that interested in porn for a while, so that would be the time to do it.
Oh, wait -- you mean, fix it today, in our world? Without killing nearly everybody that might possibly have a different idea of what "erotic" and "mature" mean? That's ridiculous. Don't be stupid.
I think he's more suggesting that certain governments could enforce their own laws against sites in their own CC TLD -- so all sites under ".us" would be U.S. jurisdiction and follow U.S. law, and ".ir" would be under Iran's. If certain countries wanted to restrict their own citizens to only browsing within their own country's TLD, then they could do that (although they'd have to build their own Great Firewall to do so).
Of course, it would be the end of the Internet as we know it, but I don't think that the anti-porn crusaders are going to let the fact that they'd be destroying one of the most significant human inventions ever created stand in their way.
I'd like to ask you to come out and post that every time somebody claims there's a giant government conspiracy afoot. Think you can handle that? It would really improve things.:)
More seriously, I agree completely. "The government" as an entity, is so disorganized it doesn't know what most of itself is doing, most of the time. It's not trying to take over your life.
The people trying to tell you how to live your life aren't in some dark bunker in Washington, or even in some smoke-filled room; they're probably living on your street. Wake up early on some Sunday morning and you'll probably see them. Unless you lead a very sheltered existence, you probably know several. They are people who disagree with you so fundamentally, and feel so strongly about their own rightness, that they are going to use the laws and government to force you into line.
They have so far been successful because they are numerous, they are organized, and they are quite dedicated. (Maybe not dedicated enough to kill themselves over it, but dedicated enough to kill other people over it, in some cases.) And they have a whole lot of money to grease the wheels of power with.
This is how democracy works; if you can get enough people together, you can enforce your morality on everybody else by force. It's just a matter of getting enough supporters and hoping those who disagree with you are more disorganized than you are.
"The government" is a flag in the wind; it blows in whichever direction the side with the most hot air -- votes, money, time and resources -- wants it to go.
the parties most familiar with the case are not concerned with truth, justice, or fairness, only with winning.
This sounds pretty reasonable; generally it's the parties most familiar with any disagreement that will be concerned not with truth, fairness, or justice, but with seeing their side prevail. It's almost always a consequence of forming an opinion on an issue that you become attached to it, and begin to think that the 'other side' are idiots or worse.
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Actually (and if you go up a ways in the thread, somebody links to the Apple TIL explaining it) modern Macs do a "sleep+suspend" at the same time. When they go to sleep, they also write the contents of RAM to a file on the disk. This way if you deplete the battery in standby, or if you remove the battery for some reason, when you power it up next, it does a wake-from-suspend rather than a complete reboot.
I don't have a Mac that's new enough to support it (my aging iBook G3 definitely doesn't) but it seems like a neat compromise feature, particularly when you consider that a Mac in standby is good for more than a week. If you're not going to use it for longer than that, hardly seems worth doing anything besides really shutting it down.
That's a very difficult question to even attempt to answer. As soon as somebody might attempt to produce a statistic showing one way or the other, the validity of that statistic could be questioned on the grounds of structural racism.
It's impossible to get statistics about who commits more crimes by race, because we don't necessarily even know how many crimes are being committed, and we don't necessarily catch the perpetrator (or even visualize them closely enough to ascertain their race). The closest you could get would be the percentage or number of people arrested for crimes by race, or convicted, or incarcerated.
Most of those statistics (the ones I've ever seen) show a disproportionate number of minorities -- particularly black males -- being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. One commonly cited figure is the percentage of black men incarcerated vs white men. But this is not necessarily equal to the number of crimes committed, since it assumes that a white and black person have the same odds, after committing a crime, of being caught, arrested, successfully prosecuted and convicted, and sentenced to prison. This is where various aspects of alleged structural racism -- intentional or not -- come into play. Questions arise about the different types of crimes and law enforcement attention paid to them, and which are more likely to be committed by each group, plus different punishments for each. Example: given two people with an equivalent amount of powder cocaine and crack cocaine -- crack being less expensive and more popular with minorities in cities -- the crack has far stiffer penalties for possession per gram.
There have been studies done where people of different races did similar activities (sat outside a fast food joint, in the one I saw), in the same locations, and could consistently be assured of more police attention if they were a minority. While not entirely convincing, it provides some weight to theories that minorities are under more police scrutiny and are thus more likely to get caught in a similar crime (say property crime) than a non-minority.
In the end, it gets so tangled that it's basically impossible to say with certainty that any particular 'race' is more or less likely to commit a crime (and then we can go back and forth on whether races actually exist in any quantifiable way). What does seem to be almost common sense though, are that some 'racial' minority groups tend to live in areas where crime exists at a higher rate than in areas inhabited by majority-group members. Though this would tend to suggest that they are more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of crimes (by virtue of proximity), the relationship isn't necessarily causative -- there's no evidence (that I've ever seen) that would substantiate calling the minority groups the source of the crime per se, or that if they were replaced by a socioeconomically similar but 'racially' different group, that the net outcomes would be different.
I fail to see your point.
Looking around the world, I see societies with fewer social and economic problems, and which consequently have less crime, and I see societies with more social and economic problems, and more crime. Frankly, it seems quite independent of gun control laws.
Comparing Europe to the U.S. and saying that the difference in crime rates is due to gun control is naive and intellectually dishonest -- it neglects the vast social, economic, and cultural differences between places. Given the lack of effect of gun control measures at preventing crime within the United States -- which is far closer to a 'controlled experiment' than comparing the U.S. to another country -- I think it's far more likely that the crime in the U.S. has its origins elsewhere.
Consider the Second:It seems quite clear to me that the first phrase is a justification for the right about to be conferred. If the right was meant to be limited to the militia, why use "the people"? There is no other place in the Constitution where "the people" is used to confer a right on a particular subgroup of people. As has been pointed out many times, if the right was really meant to apply only to members of such an organized militia, why use that wording? Why not say 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms...'? The fact that this was not the phrasing chosen, and that "the people" was invoked specifically (as it is in other Amendments, where it has been clearly interpreted as referring to all citizens at the very least) seems quite clear.
You're correct there's no semicolon between "...state" and "the right...", but there cannot be, since the first part would be a dangling phrase. Perhaps for clarity, a different verb tense should have been chosen ("A well regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state; therefore the right of the people...") but one can hardly criticize the authors for wanting to maintain consistency with the tense of the rest of the document. The chosen wording is succinct, and when read in conjunction with the rest of the document's use of the term "the people," quite unambiguous. The minimalist interpretation you espouse would be quite ridiculous (disastrous, even) if applied elsewhere, there's no reason to single out the Second.
Also, your anecdotes about New York City as misleading at best. New York City has had a handgun ban for decades, and only recently has become relatively safe -- for a very long time, while the ban was in effect, it was extremely dangerous. That the City is now safe owes very little to the handgun ban, and far more to the increased resources devoted to policing in recent years, combined with economic and social trends. There's no causation there between 'gun ban' and 'crime decrease,' since the two events didn't follow each other. If a handgun ban really was the ticket to safety, then it would have happened right after the ban -- but it didn't.
I think it's also worth pointing out that in addition to Open Carry (which I have never seen anyone in Fairfax doing, and I think would probably turn some heads -- although I'm glad the police are aware of the law in this regard) Fairfax has the same Concealed Carry law as the rest of Virginia. Once you have a permit (which is "Shall Issue," basically the State is obligated to issue you a permit unless there is a reason to prohibit you from having one, on application) you can carry a handgun on your person, concealed.
I suspect that the number of people carrying concealed handguns in Fairfax is far larger than the number of people carrying openly.
The interesting thing about Baltimore being #2, and D.C. #3 or #4 this year is that everyone got bumped down a notch because Memphis came from behind at the last minute to steal the crown as Most Dangerous; D.C. or Baltimore didn't really do anything different.
Although (and I live right outside DC, FYI) a lot of people here took this as some sort of good thing, it doesn't mean that the District got any safer necessarily, it just means that some other places got dramatically worse.
Pretty much everybody I know has a "crazy District story" involving close proximity to someone who was being shot/stabbed/mugged, and there has definitely not been any dramatic improvement there lately (in fact, if anything it's gotten worse, with previously 'safe' areas becoming more dangerous). When there is a particularly high-profile incident in a revenue-generating area of the city (Farragut, Georgetown, etc.) there will be a lot of additional police presence there for a while -- classic security theater -- in order to keep people from doing their drinking elsewhere, but nothing really changes. (And if you do get yourself shot, beaten, or stabbed in the District, you can look forward the ineptitude of the EMS service; truly a winning combination.)
That example sounds more to me like a reason why you should have off-site storage of all your email. By mandating that your employees use web services for their email and IM (which is also covered by SOX, IIRC) you can make sure that things aren't scattered all over mailservers in various locations, or on end-user machines where they're not subject to expiry rules.
Maybe not a "consumer-grade" service like GMail, sure, but that doesn't mean web services are out, it just means there's a market for web-delivered services that have guaranteed uptimes and data security guarantees (perhaps they're bonded).
Lots of companies are required to be compliant with SOX and other documentation rules, but don't have the resources to do all the management that's required to do it properly. In many cases, they're just cruising along, hoping they don't get audited. Being able to offload that responsibility to a third party (with the appropriate credentials and guarantees, and the requisite cost) would not be as unpopular as I think you think it would be.
Lots of companies push paper records storage and management out to companies like Iron Mountain; there's no reason why they wouldn't do the same thing with data.
...their tubes are clogged!
Does that mean we should get some Drano?
Assuming the ISP offers a good relay service, it shouldn't even matter.
That's kinda the issue though, isn't it? I'm not sure that's a safe assumption, since a lot of ISPs haven't been upgrading their email infrastructure to deal with increased loads in the past few years, it seems.
The main downside to Li-Polymer is that it is less efficient by volume and weight.
This, I think, is not true. LiIons may be more efficient by volume, but LiPos are almost certainly more efficient per weight, because they don't have the cells, or many of the protection mechanisms that LiIon batteries have to have.
The power/weight advantage is why they're used in applications where weight is more important than volume -- R/C aircraft, for instance. When LiPo batteries came out, they basically replaced NiCads and LiIon batteries overnight in most ultralight aircraft and helis, because they're just so much lighter (meaning that if you had an aircraft designed for NiCads, which wasn't atypical, you could get ridiculous flight time by upgrading to LiPoly cells).
But being more efficient per volume, that I could definitely believe.
The other big advantage I have heard is that with LiPo, you don't have to encase the batteries as heavily, so more of the weight and volume can actually be taken up with electricity-storing components, instead of as an 'exoskeleton' providing protection for the cells.
So, what you're saying is that there's only one self-admitted "pediphile" on MySpace who also doesn't know how to spell?
Try searching "pedophile."
Except that I believe that you can't use many of the advanced features of the GPU because it currently lacks Linux drivers.
Also, at least as of a while ago, Linux didn't take advantage of all the SPUs within Cell; I'd hope that the Sony kernel modules mentioned in this article solve that problem, but I'm not sure.
This has little to do with IP laws they were simply looking for a way so they don't have to pay the $20 per a player fee to the DVD group to handle the royalties on the codecs.
This is China, right? Since when have they cared about things like royalties or others' intellectual property?
I suspect that if they wanted to make DVD players without paying the $20 fee, they'd just make DVD players, not pay the fee, and sell them within China.
I think this is more about producing a format within China that won't be adopted by the rest of the world, allowing the Chinese government more control over the media its people watch.
I do agree, though, we need to restore balance to the system, and that means either tarrifs, or subsidies. Both of these approaches have some pretty severe shortfalls. It's like tasering someone who's slashed their wrists to prevent them from committing suicide.
You're quite right that most of his post was nonsensical, but I think that he does have an important, if not exactly salient, point about U.S. and foreign competition.
The U.S. just can't compete based on price with a lot of countries in Asia. They have a huge labor pool (granted much of it is living in poverty and squalor) and are going to be able to underbid U.S. workers every single time. There's no way to compete with that, because it's not a level playing field.
In the U.S., if you run a factory, you have to follow OSHA regulations, you have strict maximums on work-day length, you may have to deal with unions, pay hefty taxes (OASDI, etc.), and you'll have to pay a competitive salary to your workers. Contrast this with some place in Asia. Not only is the "competitive salary" far lower, but there's virtually no safety regulation or worker's-protection laws to speak of, at least nothing like they are in the U.S., and if your employees start fussing about unions, you can just fire them all and hire a new batch from those practically beating down your front gate looking for work. That we have any industry at all left in the United States is pretty amazing. But it's a losing game. No matter now efficiently you run your factory here in the U.S., no matter how much you automate and how far you slash your workforce, eventually those advances in production are going to trickle over to the Asian factories, and they're going to apply them to their production lines, combine them with the cheap labor and lack of taxes and regulatory frameworks, and undercut you.
There are a few ways this can play out. Either all the countries in Asia can adopt U.S./Western-style regulations on industry -- highly unlikely, because the people running the show there are getting quite rich as it is, so why would they want to? Or the U.S. can regress to the situation that dominates in Asia in order to compete on price. That would entail a huge drop in our quality of life here; probably back to conditions that most people haven't seen since the early part of last century.
The third option is that we forcibly level the playing field. We apply import tariffs to goods made in countries with more lax laws and labor surpluses, in order to put it on a more equal footing with efficiently-run domestic operations. If we want to maintain our quality of life, we're going to have to take drastic steps to stop the hemorrhaging. Right now, we're financing our society's lifestyle on debt, and that's not sustainable.
We have one of the largest goods markets in the world, and we're letting firms sell to that market and destroy domestic industry, who don't have to play by the same rules, and in some cases, whose parent countries don't even allow U.S. firms the same access. There's no logic there, and I've seen no evidence that it's going to bring us to anything but ruin in the long run.
Not bad, huh?
Yeah, dude! Insurance fraud is amazing!
It makes a lot of offshoring more difficult, too. A lot of callcenter operations use VOIP in order to connect the center back to the U.S. Lack of VoIP could really change the balance of advantages away from BTO stuff in India. (Perhaps in favor of the Philippines or some other Asian countries with substantial English-speaking populations.) I can't imagine anyone choosing to use the POTS system if they didn't have to, particularly if the load is basically constant and predictable.
Can't say I'm disappointed. If the Indians want to shoot themselves in the foot, they can have at it.
What library-management programs would a Rockbox-based player work with on OS X?
Anything that requires manually managing music using the Finder is a huge drag.
I'd have no problem at all paying for each of my cable TV channels individually, on a per-month basis, for commercial-free entertainment. Of course, I'd probably only subscribe to five or six channels, but that's all I'd want or watch anyway. I have no interest in receiving 200 channels of television, I'm forced to get them in order to get a small number of channels I do want.
If customers refuse to watch commercials, and either start skipping them with DVRs or only watch downloaded TV that doesn't contain them in the first place, the networks will just have to figure out a business model that actually gives people a product they want, and gives it to them at a price they're willing to pay.
Just because it's 'the way it's done' now, doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. There's money to be made in entertainment; advertising isn't the only way to do it. When people get fed up with advertising, the entertainment companies who want to stay in business will find an alternative method to make money.
Yeah that was my first thought, too. I hope that whoever ends up buying them, will at least loan them out to a museum where they can be properly protected and exhibited.
I can't blame the person who found the Edison lightbulbs in their attic for wanting to sell, though, considering what they're probably worth.
Uh huh. Which is why all those people in Europe are forced to live our their worthless, depressed, miserable lives in torment; their spirits broken because they've seen so many naked people when they were growing up.
Get real. Our culture doesn't need porn to turn our kids into shallow, vapid little bastards; it does that perfectly fine with nothing but what can be shown on network TV. At the same time, it's quite easy to find sexual imagery in other parts of the world, and by all measurable parameters, children and adolescents have healthier attitudes to sex and relationships, have fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer abortions.
Porn is only bad when it's a young person's only exposure to sexuality. When the only breasts you ever see are Pamela Anderson's, and your only source for relationship advice is Snoop Dogg, it's no wonder that kids get screwy ideas. The problem isn't that they've seen Pamela's boobs or listened to Snoop Dogg On Dating, but that they haven't heard or seen healthy examples that answer the questions they're asking and what they want to know.
What's harmful to children is the attitude behind much censorship, which is basically that "sexuality is bad, and shouldn't be talked about." It's that silence on the part of parents and our culture in general, that would make kids watch porn and think that it's somehow representative of real life. A child who knows and understands what healthy relationships are supposed to entail, and also knows what porn is, and what it isn't, isn't going to be damaged by seeing it.
The problem isn't the porn. The problem is that we're incapable of talking about the porn.
Isn't this something that a globally enforced .XXX domain name for erotica and .MAT for mature would fix?
Yep. Of course, after the nuclear war and super-smallpox epidemic that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population, I don't think people will be that interested in porn for a while, so that would be the time to do it.
Oh, wait -- you mean, fix it today, in our world? Without killing nearly everybody that might possibly have a different idea of what "erotic" and "mature" mean? That's ridiculous. Don't be stupid.
I think he's more suggesting that certain governments could enforce their own laws against sites in their own CC TLD -- so all sites under ".us" would be U.S. jurisdiction and follow U.S. law, and ".ir" would be under Iran's. If certain countries wanted to restrict their own citizens to only browsing within their own country's TLD, then they could do that (although they'd have to build their own Great Firewall to do so).
Of course, it would be the end of the Internet as we know it, but I don't think that the anti-porn crusaders are going to let the fact that they'd be destroying one of the most significant human inventions ever created stand in their way.
I bet they were just more thorough or cautious in their analysis before declaring anything.
NASA is more cautious than anal-probe radio-show guy?
What a bunch of pansies! That's no way to do science.
I'd like to ask you to come out and post that every time somebody claims there's a giant government conspiracy afoot. Think you can handle that? It would really improve things. :)
More seriously, I agree completely. "The government" as an entity, is so disorganized it doesn't know what most of itself is doing, most of the time. It's not trying to take over your life.
The people trying to tell you how to live your life aren't in some dark bunker in Washington, or even in some smoke-filled room; they're probably living on your street. Wake up early on some Sunday morning and you'll probably see them. Unless you lead a very sheltered existence, you probably know several. They are people who disagree with you so fundamentally, and feel so strongly about their own rightness, that they are going to use the laws and government to force you into line.
They have so far been successful because they are numerous, they are organized, and they are quite dedicated. (Maybe not dedicated enough to kill themselves over it, but dedicated enough to kill other people over it, in some cases.) And they have a whole lot of money to grease the wheels of power with.
This is how democracy works; if you can get enough people together, you can enforce your morality on everybody else by force. It's just a matter of getting enough supporters and hoping those who disagree with you are more disorganized than you are.
"The government" is a flag in the wind; it blows in whichever direction the side with the most hot air -- votes, money, time and resources -- wants it to go.
the parties most familiar with the case are not concerned with truth, justice, or fairness, only with winning.
This sounds pretty reasonable; generally it's the parties most familiar with any disagreement that will be concerned not with truth, fairness, or justice, but with seeing their side prevail. It's almost always a consequence of forming an opinion on an issue that you become attached to it, and begin to think that the 'other side' are idiots or worse.