When I bought my Playstation 2, I didn't particularly care about backwards compatibility. Why not? Because I already had a PS 1. This is relevant because the current installed base of Xboxes is a lot less than what the installed base of Playstations was when PS2 came out -- which means there's more people that could benefit from Xbox 2 backwards compatibility than were able to benefit from Playstation 2 backwards compatibility. I would be more inclined to by an Xbox 2 if I knew that by buying one, I could also play all the Xbox games that I can't play now because I don't have an Xbox.
Yes, but... a true geek would know better than to post their real email address to Slashdot. He probably made the account 5 minutes before posting his comment. A true geek knows that the only thing Hotmail is good for is generating throwaway email addresses. And no, Mailinator won't work for this because then someone could steal the invite.
Then again, maybe he's a third class geek that uses Hotmail and makes the spam even worse by posting his email on Slashdot.
Assume this law passes, so it's illegal to show someone how to infringe copyright. Now certainly, murder is a worse crime than copyright infringement, so if it's illegal to show someone how to infringe copyright, it should also be illegal to show someone how to commit murder. Right?
Once that law passes, you sue the MPAA for every violent R-rated movie for showing people how to use a gun to commit murder (or they just quit making those kinds of movies, in which case they lost a large percentage of their revenues).
It has to be that way or else the ruling would be meaningless. For example:
Before the ruling: Phone line is $20, DSL is $30, and you're not allowed to have a DSL line without also having phone service.
After the ruling: Phone line is $20 and DSL is $50. You can have DSL without the phone line if you want... BUT, accept our special offer today, and you can get BOTH phone service and a DSL line for just $50 a month! That's a savings of $20 off your monthly bill!
The advice that's usually given is to save 6 months' living expenses, not 6 months' gross salary. So if you make, say, $10k a month, but $5k goes to income tax, and of the remaining $5k, you could get by on $2k if you really had to, then you're looking at saving $12k. Not $60k. The idea is that if you lose your job or something, you have enough money to pay the bills for 6 months while you look for a new job.
The other thing to remember is that having 3 months of expenses saved is better than nothing. One month is better than nothing. Don't just give up completely because someone you've never met sets an expectation that seems (or is) impossible to meet.
This is why all of this depends on your individual situation, and it's impossible to make blanket statements like "it's always better to buy." Based on your numbers, it looks like you live somewhere expensive ($1500 for a 2br apartment???) but bought your condo years ago, when real estate was still cheap ($1700 payment, mostly equity means at most $850/month in interest. At 6%, you can't owe much more than $170k. You can't buy a shed in someone's backyard for $170k in a city where 2br apartments go for $1500/month). I don't dispute that owning is almost always better if you stay in one place for a long time. Right now, in Silicon Valley, I think that owning is a less attractive option than it would be in a normal housing market.
You can rent a 1br apartment for $900. A house would cost around $400,000, so your monthly expenses would look something like this (assuming 10% down payment):
The first two are tax deductible (subtract $700), but this still adds up to $1650, and I know I'm leaving out some stuff like maintenance costs, higher utility bills, etc. That's almost twice as much expense per month, NOT counting the portion of the mortgage payment that goes toward principal (it's not actually an expense, since it reduces the amount of debt you owe). Plus there's the $24,000 real estate agent commission when you sell the place.
After 5 years, "saving the difference" would add up to ($750 * 60) = $45,000 plus interest.
That doesn't mean you can't come out ahead -- house prices tend to go up over time. I just think that if you're in it for the short term (meaning less than 5-7 years), you're going to have a very hard time seeing enough appreciation to overcome the commission and the higher monthly expenses -- especially in a market that is losing jobs, losing population, and people can barely afford the houses as it is. A house is only worth what someone is willing (and able) to pay for it.
Being single, there's also the quality of life benefit of having no yardwork, minimal housework, and a phone number I can call if anything breaks.
"Why can't you work out at home?" Because the $10k in equpiment I use is at the Gym. The $5 handweights I bought for use at the computer are all well and good, but they don't help me get stronger and they do shit for cardio.
It looks like here, gaming might actually be the solution rather than the problem.
I think it depends on what your situation is. If you have a family, and you're deciding between renting a house and owning a house, and you don't plan on moving to a different city anytime soon, you should buy a house. If you're single, and renting means living in an apartment, then renting has a lot of advantages.
To people who think owning a house is easier: When you rent, you have to pay the rent, vacuum once in a while, and call maintenance if something breaks. Renters insurance is also a good idea. If you want to move, you turn in a 30 day notice.
When you own a house, you have to pay the mortgage, pay the property tax, pay the homeowners association fee, buy homeowners insurance, buy private mortgage insurance (unless you can come up with 20% for the down payment; good luck coming up with 20% of $500,000 in Silicon Valley), vacuum a much larger area, mow the lawn, do yardwork, and go to Home Depot if something breaks and then spend Saturday afternoon fixing it. You've also responsible for leaky pipes, termites, roofs that need to be replaced, walls that need to be repainted, and mortgages that exceed the value of the house because the housing bubble finally collapsed. If you want to move, you hire a real estate agent (costs about 6% of the value of the house) and look for a buyer. Depending on where you live and how good your agent is, this could take anywhere from a few days to over a year.
If you're single, and want to be able to afford a house once you're married, I say figure out how much more owning a house would cost per month, then keep renting and save the difference. You should end up with plenty of money for a down payment (real estate markets vary; this may not be true in certain parts of the country).
To those who say "owning your own place is so much more secure," I have two questions: (a) If you rent an apartment, what happens if you can't pay the rent? (b) If you own a house, what happens if you can't pay the mortgage?
At the 99-cent price, only about 10 cents from each song sale goes to Apple's bottom line, with about 70 cents going to the record labels and the other 20 cents paying for credit-card fees and distribution costs, sources say.
Really? Funny how no one even mentions how much money the ARTISTS are getting out of the deal.
Price of song 0.99 Record label gets -0.70 Credit card fees -0.20 Apple's cut -0.10 -------- Artist royalty (0.01)
I went to CMU and yes, the steam tunnels are part of the culture there. It sounds like maybe Caltech is more lax with the security than CMU is though... I never heard of anyone using the steam tunnels just to avoid rain/snow/sleet/other nasty Pittsburgh precipitation on the way to class, and Pittsburgh weather is a lot worse than LA weather. Perhaps you're exeggerating a bit? People do find ways into the CMU steam tunnels, but (as I recall) usually late at night, and carefully.
Now if someone had filed a FOIA request about the tunnels, I can see asking some questions, as long as we remember that people are innocent until proven guilty. Similarly, if you decide to take a few dozen pictures of the support pillars for the Brooklyn Bridge, don't be surprised if the FBI wants to ask you a few questions. The problem is, I'd also like to be able to trust the government not to take things too far or violate people's rights, and I have a really hard time trusting the current administration.
Using the shipping address just means that I now start shipping my purchases to my office or to a mail drop somwhere. Still doesn't prove that I bought what they think I have...
What credit card are you using to pay for your purchases? If the IRS (or state tax agency in this case) wants to find tax evasion, they have a lot of tools they can use to do it. For example, the IRS looks for people that manage to live in upscale homes, drive nice cars, etc. on $20,000/year.
We've already discussed most of what's in this document. For example:
3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative." OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
MS has been saying things like this about OSS for years. Of course they don't mention what your options are if a bug in MS Office goes unresolved.
G4 never had potential. Games are an interactive media. Why in God's name would you want to read news and view clips of other people playing games when you could be playing them yourself? Why wait 25 minutes see a review on a game you're curious about when you can go online and find it in 25 seconds?
I agree, but wouldn't this criticism apply to a lot of other (successful) TV shows too? Why should I sit through 25 minutes of "news" stories I don't care about to see the one story I could have found in 25 seconds on an internet news site? Why sit through the Oscars when I can just look up the winners the next day on the web? Why watch an NBA game instead of going outside and actually playing basketball?
TV doesn't have to be all that good, it just has to be good enough to grab your attention while channel surfing.
I never said it was perfect, but it's improving all the time. Also, 95% accuracy would be good enough for most of the messages I get anyway. If it's from someone I know, it would be no worse than a typo-filled email (if I need to call them back, I would already have their phone number). If it's telemarketing or political candidates, that gets deleted. As for the small fraction of calls where I would actually need to copy down a phone number or something, that's why I said I'd want a sound file of the actual recording in case something got lost in the voice-to-text translation.
emailing answering machine recordings.. I don't think so. Emailing the entire answering machine recording could backfire. That could easily be used as a DoS against someone's email box ("Let's all leave a message for that ass Professor Doofus tonight!")
Or better yet, use voice-recognition software to translate the message to text, and send it to my email. I can read (or skim) faster than I can listen. Of course, I'd also want the recording (which wouldn't take up much space, as someone else already pointed out) in case someone left a phone number and the software didn't translate it correctly.
This is something I also wish I had realized a lot earlier than I did. On the surface, it looks like there's one "cool" group of people, and everyone should try to be accepted by that group. What I (eventually) found is that the main difference between that group and the others is they're just more self-aggrandizing. You're a lot better off making friends with whoever you have the most in common with (they'll accept you more readily than the "cool" kids you have nothing in common with anyway). If the "cool" kids don't like you, so what? It doesn't matter if you impress them or not.
Also, who says you have to stick to one clique? If someone has a problem with this, why would I want to spend time with them anyway?
Since none of this matters in the long run anyway (nobody stays in touch with high school friends after graduation anyway, or if they do, it's 2 or 3 close friends at the most), you might as well have as much fun as you can (or at least minimize the unpleasantness as much as possible) while you're there. I never saw a college application that asked me for a letter of recommendation from the captain of the football team or to say how many cheerleaders I hooked up with.
I agree. I voted this morning and also ran into problems with getting the wrong party's ballot. My case was a little different -- I switched parties a few months ago (from Republican to Democrat) and they still had me listed as a Republican, even though my new registration had been processed (I got the correct sample ballot in the mail). This created some confusion, but I was able to cast a Democratic ballot and the poll workers were doing their best to be helpful (though I don't think they ever figured out what they were really supposed to do in this situation).
But on the plus side, that's one less laptop thief, and your data hasn't been stolen. Big companies tend to worry a lot more about people stealing confidential data than they do about having to pay to replace hardware.
I disagree that loud laptop alarms won't be effective because they're unnoticed -- after all, the places they'd be used would most likely be study areas or libraries, which are typically very quiet
Unfortunately, a lot of laptop theft happens in really noisy places like airports and train stations. If one of these goes off in the terminal at O'Hare or LAX, it will get ignored. I agree it would be useful at the library though.
Thieves are often more interested in the data on the laptop than they are in the laptop itself. Nobody got rich taking stolen laptops to the pawn shop, but you can get rich stealing competitiors' product designs, or getting next quarter's MSFT earnings report before it's released.
Also, if they're just looking for quick drug money, laptop theft isn't such a bad way to do it. Grabbing a laptop at the airport and pawning it makes a lot more money than sticking up a 7-eleven for the 20 bucks in the register, and the sentence is a lot lighter since it's not armed robbery.
Slashdot Mirror
When I bought my Playstation 2, I didn't particularly care about backwards compatibility. Why not? Because I already had a PS 1. This is relevant because the current installed base of Xboxes is a lot less than what the installed base of Playstations was when PS2 came out -- which means there's more people that could benefit from Xbox 2 backwards compatibility than were able to benefit from Playstation 2 backwards compatibility. I would be more inclined to by an Xbox 2 if I knew that by buying one, I could also play all the Xbox games that I can't play now because I don't have an Xbox.
Yes, but... a true geek would know better than to post their real email address to Slashdot. He probably made the account 5 minutes before posting his comment. A true geek knows that the only thing Hotmail is good for is generating throwaway email addresses. And no, Mailinator won't work for this because then someone could steal the invite.
Then again, maybe he's a third class geek that uses Hotmail and makes the spam even worse by posting his email on Slashdot.
Assume this law passes, so it's illegal to show someone how to infringe copyright. Now certainly, murder is a worse crime than copyright infringement, so if it's illegal to show someone how to infringe copyright, it should also be illegal to show someone how to commit murder. Right?
Once that law passes, you sue the MPAA for every violent R-rated movie for showing people how to use a gun to commit murder (or they just quit making those kinds of movies, in which case they lost a large percentage of their revenues).
I don't know about the blue text, but I definitely prefer black backgrounds on terminal emulators. It's easier on the eyes.
It has to be that way or else the ruling would be meaningless. For example:
Before the ruling: Phone line is $20, DSL is $30, and you're not allowed to have a DSL line without also having phone service.
After the ruling: Phone line is $20 and DSL is $50. You can have DSL without the phone line if you want... BUT, accept our special offer today, and you can get BOTH phone service and a DSL line for just $50 a month! That's a savings of $20 off your monthly bill!
The advice that's usually given is to save 6 months' living expenses, not 6 months' gross salary. So if you make, say, $10k a month, but $5k goes to income tax, and of the remaining $5k, you could get by on $2k if you really had to, then you're looking at saving $12k. Not $60k. The idea is that if you lose your job or something, you have enough money to pay the bills for 6 months while you look for a new job.
The other thing to remember is that having 3 months of expenses saved is better than nothing. One month is better than nothing. Don't just give up completely because someone you've never met sets an expectation that seems (or is) impossible to meet.
This is why all of this depends on your individual situation, and it's impossible to make blanket statements like "it's always better to buy." Based on your numbers, it looks like you live somewhere expensive ($1500 for a 2br apartment???) but bought your condo years ago, when real estate was still cheap ($1700 payment, mostly equity means at most $850/month in interest. At 6%, you can't owe much more than $170k. You can't buy a shed in someone's backyard for $170k in a city where 2br apartments go for $1500/month). I don't dispute that owning is almost always better if you stay in one place for a long time. Right now, in Silicon Valley, I think that owning is a less attractive option than it would be in a normal housing market.
You can rent a 1br apartment for $900. A house would cost around $400,000, so your monthly expenses would look something like this (assuming 10% down payment):
Mortgage interest (6%): $1800
Property tax (1%): $300
HOA fee, PMI, Homeowners insurance: $250(?)
The first two are tax deductible (subtract $700), but this still adds up to $1650, and I know I'm leaving out some stuff like maintenance costs, higher utility bills, etc. That's almost twice as much expense per month, NOT counting the portion of the mortgage payment that goes toward principal (it's not actually an expense, since it reduces the amount of debt you owe). Plus there's the $24,000 real estate agent commission when you sell the place.
After 5 years, "saving the difference" would add up to ($750 * 60) = $45,000 plus interest.
That doesn't mean you can't come out ahead -- house prices tend to go up over time. I just think that if you're in it for the short term (meaning less than 5-7 years), you're going to have a very hard time seeing enough appreciation to overcome the commission and the higher monthly expenses -- especially in a market that is losing jobs, losing population, and people can barely afford the houses as it is. A house is only worth what someone is willing (and able) to pay for it.
Being single, there's also the quality of life benefit of having no yardwork, minimal housework, and a phone number I can call if anything breaks.
"Why can't you work out at home?" Because the $10k in equpiment I use is at the Gym. The $5 handweights I bought for use at the computer are all well and good, but they don't help me get stronger and they do shit for cardio.
It looks like here, gaming might actually be the solution rather than the problem.
I think it depends on what your situation is. If you have a family, and you're deciding between renting a house and owning a house, and you don't plan on moving to a different city anytime soon, you should buy a house. If you're single, and renting means living in an apartment, then renting has a lot of advantages.
To people who think owning a house is easier: When you rent, you have to pay the rent, vacuum once in a while, and call maintenance if something breaks. Renters insurance is also a good idea. If you want to move, you turn in a 30 day notice.
When you own a house, you have to pay the mortgage, pay the property tax, pay the homeowners association fee, buy homeowners insurance, buy private mortgage insurance (unless you can come up with 20% for the down payment; good luck coming up with 20% of $500,000 in Silicon Valley), vacuum a much larger area, mow the lawn, do yardwork, and go to Home Depot if something breaks and then spend Saturday afternoon fixing it. You've also responsible for leaky pipes, termites, roofs that need to be replaced, walls that need to be repainted, and mortgages that exceed the value of the house because the housing bubble finally collapsed. If you want to move, you hire a real estate agent (costs about 6% of the value of the house) and look for a buyer. Depending on where you live and how good your agent is, this could take anywhere from a few days to over a year.
If you're single, and want to be able to afford a house once you're married, I say figure out how much more owning a house would cost per month, then keep renting and save the difference. You should end up with plenty of money for a down payment (real estate markets vary; this may not be true in certain parts of the country).
To those who say "owning your own place is so much more secure," I have two questions:
(a) If you rent an apartment, what happens if you can't pay the rent?
(b) If you own a house, what happens if you can't pay the mortgage?
At the 99-cent price, only about 10 cents from each song sale goes to Apple's bottom line, with about 70 cents going to the record labels and the other 20 cents paying for credit-card fees and distribution costs, sources say.
Really? Funny how no one even mentions how much money the ARTISTS are getting out of the deal.
Price of song 0.99
Record label gets -0.70
Credit card fees -0.20
Apple's cut -0.10
--------
Artist royalty (0.01)
There are no steam tunnels at Carnegie Mellon.
I didn't realize the Iraqi information minister had a Slashdot account. CMU most definitely has steam tunnels.
I went to CMU and yes, the steam tunnels are part of the culture there. It sounds like maybe Caltech is more lax with the security than CMU is though... I never heard of anyone using the steam tunnels just to avoid rain/snow/sleet/other nasty Pittsburgh precipitation on the way to class, and Pittsburgh weather is a lot worse than LA weather. Perhaps you're exeggerating a bit? People do find ways into the CMU steam tunnels, but (as I recall) usually late at night, and carefully.
Now if someone had filed a FOIA request about the tunnels, I can see asking some questions, as long as we remember that people are innocent until proven guilty. Similarly, if you decide to take a few dozen pictures of the support pillars for the Brooklyn Bridge, don't be surprised if the FBI wants to ask you a few questions. The problem is, I'd also like to be able to trust the government not to take things too far or violate people's rights, and I have a really hard time trusting the current administration.
The Toyota Prius already gets 60mpg in the city. Imagine the gas mileage these cars could get if they used one of these motors.
Using the shipping address just means that I now start shipping my purchases to my office or to a mail drop somwhere. Still doesn't prove that I bought what they think I have...
What credit card are you using to pay for your purchases? If the IRS (or state tax agency in this case) wants to find tax evasion, they have a lot of tools they can use to do it. For example, the IRS looks for people that manage to live in upscale homes, drive nice cars, etc. on $20,000/year.
Do I have to pay a use tax on the cost of my Slashdot subscription?
We've already discussed most of what's in this document. For example:
3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative." OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
MS has been saying things like this about OSS for years. Of course they don't mention what your options are if a bug in MS Office goes unresolved.
G4 never had potential. Games are an interactive media. Why in God's name would you want to read news and view clips of other people playing games when you could be playing them yourself? Why wait 25 minutes see a review on a game you're curious about when you can go online and find it in 25 seconds?
I agree, but wouldn't this criticism apply to a lot of other (successful) TV shows too? Why should I sit through 25 minutes of "news" stories I don't care about to see the one story I could have found in 25 seconds on an internet news site? Why sit through the Oscars when I can just look up the winners the next day on the web? Why watch an NBA game instead of going outside and actually playing basketball?
TV doesn't have to be all that good, it just has to be good enough to grab your attention while channel surfing.
I never said it was perfect, but it's improving all the time. Also, 95% accuracy would be good enough for most of the messages I get anyway. If it's from someone I know, it would be no worse than a typo-filled email (if I need to call them back, I would already have their phone number). If it's telemarketing or political candidates, that gets deleted. As for the small fraction of calls where I would actually need to copy down a phone number or something, that's why I said I'd want a sound file of the actual recording in case something got lost in the voice-to-text translation.
emailing answering machine recordings.. I don't think so. Emailing the entire answering machine recording could backfire. That could easily be used as a DoS against someone's email box ("Let's all leave a message for that ass Professor Doofus tonight!")
Or better yet, use voice-recognition software to translate the message to text, and send it to my email. I can read (or skim) faster than I can listen. Of course, I'd also want the recording (which wouldn't take up much space, as someone else already pointed out) in case someone left a phone number and the software didn't translate it correctly.
I've heard book sales are up, but not reading, which is highly interesting.
Maybe the book publishers just raised their prices. Does "sales" mean number of books sold or does it mean dollars of revenue generated?
This is something I also wish I had realized a lot earlier than I did. On the surface, it looks like there's one "cool" group of people, and everyone should try to be accepted by that group. What I (eventually) found is that the main difference between that group and the others is they're just more self-aggrandizing. You're a lot better off making friends with whoever you have the most in common with (they'll accept you more readily than the "cool" kids you have nothing in common with anyway). If the "cool" kids don't like you, so what? It doesn't matter if you impress them or not.
Also, who says you have to stick to one clique? If someone has a problem with this, why would I want to spend time with them anyway?
Since none of this matters in the long run anyway (nobody stays in touch with high school friends after graduation anyway, or if they do, it's 2 or 3 close friends at the most), you might as well have as much fun as you can (or at least minimize the unpleasantness as much as possible) while you're there. I never saw a college application that asked me for a letter of recommendation from the captain of the football team or to say how many cheerleaders I hooked up with.
I agree. I voted this morning and also ran into problems with getting the wrong party's ballot. My case was a little different -- I switched parties a few months ago (from Republican to Democrat) and they still had me listed as a Republican, even though my new registration had been processed (I got the correct sample ballot in the mail). This created some confusion, but I was able to cast a Democratic ballot and the poll workers were doing their best to be helpful (though I don't think they ever figured out what they were really supposed to do in this situation).
More on this in my journal.
But on the plus side, that's one less laptop thief, and your data hasn't been stolen. Big companies tend to worry a lot more about people stealing confidential data than they do about having to pay to replace hardware.
I disagree that loud laptop alarms won't be effective because they're unnoticed -- after all, the places they'd be used would most likely be study areas or libraries, which are typically very quiet
Unfortunately, a lot of laptop theft happens in really noisy places like airports and train stations. If one of these goes off in the terminal at O'Hare or LAX, it will get ignored. I agree it would be useful at the library though.
Thieves are often more interested in the data on the laptop than they are in the laptop itself. Nobody got rich taking stolen laptops to the pawn shop, but you can get rich stealing competitiors' product designs, or getting next quarter's MSFT earnings report before it's released.
Also, if they're just looking for quick drug money, laptop theft isn't such a bad way to do it. Grabbing a laptop at the airport and pawning it makes a lot more money than sticking up a 7-eleven for the 20 bucks in the register, and the sentence is a lot lighter since it's not armed robbery.