Effectively, it has to do with foreign ownership rules. (Ironically, something that the CRTC is responsible for enforcing, which lead us to this problem in the first place.)
So! Because of some legal argle-bargle, Canadian telcos must have majority ownership in Canada. It means that a big US company can't come and set up shop. Nor anyone else from anywhere else. Wind Mobile kinda skirted the rules a bit, but it was a desperate play and it looked like it wasn't going to work for a while there.
So the big telcos can operate with relative impunity because it's effin' expensive to set up national infrastructure in a country like Canada. They were effectively gifted the copper (as I recall) in the first place when it was phone and cable TV lines, and now they've got a stranglehold. This applies in many different areas, as well; Rogers does home internet as well as cable TV and mobile phones. But they're not technically a monopoly because Bell does the same thing. So you've got a few (barely) competing entities that see no reason to lower prices because going to the other guy means you're still bent over the table for exactly the same price, and the only difference is whose name you mutter through clenched teeth.
Wouldn't Apple be the least likely to sell your data? I mean, they've GOT what they want: you on their platform. They don't need to sell your data to anyone—frankly, it probably runs counter to their own interests if they do. If you've already bought into their platform, they'll try to treat you well so you don't jump ship to some other platform, and that's it. Google and Dropbox don't have any other way to monetize you than to blitz you with ads or sell your data because they've got nothing else to sell.
The problem with everyone that bleats about the market correcting itself is that they forget that the ideal market relies on ideal people that are well informed at all times and have enough information to make a decision.
CO2 is colourless and odourless. How is the average person supposed to know the effects of CO2 if there isn't an expert to tell them that this is a problem? And once the expert has informed them, what recourse does that person have? The government is a way to make decisions on behalf of citizens to protect them and to give them power that they don't have individually. While it's not feasible for EVERYONE in a population to know about the problems CO2 cause, it IS possible for a few people to know and to give their expertise. Then it is the government, acting on behalf of the people (since the people selected the government, or the government is otherwise ostensibly acting in the best interests of the population) that can move to remove these problems that affect the whole population, whether they know it or not.
The government has done this many times, usually through regulation. For instance, there isn't lead in gasoline anymore. We don't have as big a problem with CFCs anymore (though the lingering effects of our past mistakes is still around). Etc.
However, what we're talking about here is something that is both dangerous but to an extent, indispensable. It simply isn't currently possible to maintain our way of life without fossil fuels at the moment. New technology will not be able to upset the status quo until such time as fossil fuels are unavailable because new technology is almost always less efficient and costs more while economies of scale aren't present. And, again, not everyone knows or believes the harm that is being done. This is exactly the sort of thing that the government was meant to take care of.
By levying taxes—and in this case, I believe they should be revenue neutral taxes—they can change behaviour, fix the problem that the market is itself unable to solve because of the flaws of the actors involved, and generally leave us in a better position than when we started.
Governments protect our best interests, and the market protects its OWN interest. There is a reasonable balance to be struck.
I live in Canada. I've lived in Canada all my life (Alberta and Quebec). I can rock a FWD car out of a snowbank that is up to the wheel wells. If I can't move the car with a shovel, a bit of time, and my own effort, most 4WD vehicles wouldn't have made it out of that situation either.
I've driven in blinding snowstorms through the crow's nest pass in the Rockies, and I've been stuck on the top of the Coquihalla with the semis putting the chains on their wheels. I made it through there just the same as they did. All I needed was some winter tyres and a modicum of care.
With traction control systems and some experience, driving in the snow is not a thing that requires 4WD. I know that they're better in the snow and ice, but they're not essential. Even with the car that I have (diesel VW Jetta wagon), which has a very low nose and consequently not much ground clearance, city driving in bad conditions isn't a concern. If it's so bad that I can't move the car, it's too bad to be driving, period.
If you need an SUV or truck—and there are people that do, obviously—then that's fine. But you almost never need one just for day-to-day things driving in the city.
For two people, it's trivially cheaper to buy a movie on blu-ray if you have a big-ish TV and a blu-ray player. I understand that these are fairly big 'ifs', but I happened to already have these things because I own a PS3 and a Plasma TV.
But if those two things are assumed, you can buy a BD movie for $25-$40. Less if it's on sale.
If you hate the movie, you can almost always find someone that's willing to pay at least $10 for it. So now you've got a price range of $15-30 for the movie. (If I decide that I like the movie enough to keep it, the nominal price is divided by the number of times that I watch it. Honestly, I've yet to sell a movie since I don't buy movies that I don't think I'll like.)
Movie tickets around here are up to $14 after tax, I believe. So I'm practically even already, for just one ticket. If there's more than one of you, obviously the amortization gets better very quickly.
I can buy the snacks I want, pause, sit in a comfortable chair, pet my cats or go to the bathroom if I like. I can do almost all of those things at the same time, actually.
To get to a decent movie theatre is a half-hour trip for me, at least, by metro. (That's a $3 cost; that's far cheaper than driving the car and paying for parking, almost certainly.) If I buy the movie from Amazon.ca, it's delivered to my door.
The ONLY thing I miss out on is seeing the movie as a brand new release. But it turns out that sometime in my late 20s, I stopped caring about that. Now that I'm in my mid-30s, the whole movie-going ordeal seems like a tremendous waste of time given all the other things that I'd like to do.
So, to review: I save time and money, and sacrifice a bit of timeliness for incredible convenience. What in the world do they expect to happen with ticket prices?
I'm not sure it's that much of a surprise. They recently found that spider mites are capable of lateral DNA transfer from bacteria and fungi, which is why you can't really stop them for long. The insects in this article aren't spider mites, I realise, but circumventing the protection of plants is to a certain extent the entire PURPOSE of these organisms. I'm not suggesting that they're also capable of this lateral transfer trickery, but they can run experiments* on these plants a lot faster than we can run experiments on them.
*By experiments, I mean that millions of these organisms can fling themselves at this crop until one of them survives and reproduces. They're effectively running a massively parallel biological experiment. If they're not completely wiped out in short order, they'll pretty much always find a way to win. The only thing I know of that's successfully defeated them is honey. Everything else succumbs in time.
I'm just saying antenna problems aren't the exclusive domain of Apple. It's just that the iPhone is so popular and newsworthy that even non-newsworthy things make it to the news.:)
1) This isn't a freedom of speech argument. 2) Apple has, from the outset, dictated the applications allowed to run on its devices.
Flash, Apple claims, is a battery killer. And they're right. It's brutal. It's a CPU hog on a desktop machine, and a CPU hog on a mobile device is necessarily something that drains the battery faster than normal.
This is the market at work. You can't even cry 'monopoly' here because there are other options, and Apple wasn't using any monopolistic power (which, obviously, it doesn't even have) to promote a competing technology.
Apple doesn't have to let anyone do anything. Apple could have told everyone the only app they could write was for counting how much money Apple makes and everything else would be rejected out of hand, and that STILL would have been well within Apple's right and authority. It would have been a MORONIC business decision, but that's it.
In any case, ultimately, Apple can't stop you from doing anything. Jailbreak your device and write a new flash interpreter and run it under iOS if you can.
Wow, which/. are you reading? At the top, there's this comment that's currently rated +5, informative:
"Apple behaviour is pretty disgusting and, I'd join the embargo 'BUT' damn I've always found their gear to be overhyped and overpriced and basically always gone else where. I'll think you'll find that this is pretty much the trend with the majority of computer geeks.
For what it's worth I vow never to buy an Apple product;D."
I don't even understand which bit counts as 'informative'. The Apple haters are out in full force with their mod points, too.
I've got no beef against Ms. Hackborn in particular, but it's clear that she has a dog in this hunt. Take her words with as big a grain of salt as you would from someone that works at Apple.
But putting aside the practical matters (i.e., whether any boycott could even be reasonably mustered), would an Apple boycott really help matters? Let's consider that until Apple got into the iPod business, the music players were all pretty uninspiring. Apple made that a viable bit of industry. The iTunes music store brought us prices for mainstream music that were effectively unheard of previously, and for those of us that were interested in buying digital music instead of finding, er...alternate sources, it finally gave us a place to go.
The iPhone is remarkable mainly in the power it wrested away from the telecoms. Now Samsung can show up and say, "This is the phone we designed. Take it or leave it." Previously, the specs would have been given to Samsung and they would have done the best they could with very little latitude of their own.
Apple disrupts markets. Maybe they shouldn't be such dicks about it after they've wedged themselves into a space, but they're making markets that either don't exist or exist only as a poorly exploited niche.
They didn't 'ban' flash. Well, not broadly. They wouldn't allow it to run on their iOS systems, but you can still get it for your OS X machine. And obviously they didn't ban it on any other device. Flash died because Apple didn't want it sucking up battery life. If it was such a great technology, Apple would have capitulated because customers would have left in droves for flash enabled smartphones, but they didn't.
Flash is a blight. It was a blight TEN YEARS AGO. Adobe decided that they'd spend the last ten years sticking with the buggy, insecure, slow, poorly optimized status quo, and when someone finally called them on it, a few people got hot under the collar about it. And for nothing, I might add, since nobody really seems to care that much.
People on/. have been calling for the demise of Flash for years.
Moderation system is broken today, where something like this gets modded +5 informative. 'Informative'? What information is in this post that's meaningful or relevant? That this person is never going to buy an Apple product? The ";D"?
This fountain pen is $47,000, and only because it's ON SALE.
The normal retail price is $60000. Because I'd like to point this out in all caps, I'll type out the price: SIXTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS.
FOR A PEN.
(I was looking for fountain pens a little while back and discovered this.)
Audiophiles are crazy, but there are apparently crazier people still. You can buy a nice BMW for that money. Or, y'know, pay someone's salary for a year.:/
I don't believe in a GENERATION of failed, overly aggressive 'femi-nazis'. There are bad apples in ever group. Fringes establish. You got some crazy zealots at some point, but 'femi-nazi' is a term coined by boys' club white men threatened by ACTUAL feminists. Nobody ever *really* took the crazy fringes seriously, but there's a body of people out there that are scared of the change that feminism brings, so they whipped up this term to discredit them and demonize the entire feminism movement. I've met so many sex-positive, equal-rights loving women that don't like being called feminists because of that so-called 'femi-nazi' association.
I'm a feminist, too. And I'm a dude. I think you're pretty much bang on for the whole thing except point three. I know you're hardly going for encyclopedia-level reliability here, but the third generation merely made it possible for the fringes to exist which, now that I think about it, is a weird sort of victory in itself.
There're lots of (unilingual, or mostly unilingual) Anglos (like me) that work in software in Quebec (Montreal, specifically). I work with a lot of people that are so fluently multilingual, you'd never know they spoke more than one language if they were speaking to you in English.
Not only is it off by default, apparently it's only allowed to access information at a layer that doesn't give away the farm. It's not recording your keypresses, the sites you visit (which apparently the HTC version does even if you're on WiFi) or anything else that's possibly a significant security risk. Supposedly, it really does act just as it's claimed to in the press releases.
(I'm aware that I use 'apparently' and 'supposedly'; I have no concrete info that I've tested myself, this is just what I've read today.)
At some point, he decided to get a RAM upgrade. He had the choice between 32MB and 64MB, and he went with the 64MB, but it wasn't much of a choice, since they *cost the same amount*. For some reason, the upgrade cost was per SIMM, irrespective of the actual amount of RAM on it.
As I recall, it was several thousand dollars. But that was hardly relevant for a computer that cost $15000 out of the box (CDN).
To this day, it was one of the finest, most responsive machines I've ever used (and is responsible for my switch to OS X). It could do so much on 25MHz; it makes me sad about how little I can do with 2.8GHz.:/
Most bad science doesn't really persist for long. So once we entered the real scientific era, concepts tended to be good, but too simplistic. So the model of the atom hasn't really been wrong for decades, just imprecise. Similarly with models of the solar system. Basically correct, but not so wrong that they were unworkable.
Really, I think maybe it's just better to point out that the scientific method tends not to entirely invalidate old systems, but make them better and more complete, and the 'failure' of old systems is mainly imprecision. That's certainly the case in terms of Newton, or the Bohr-Rutherford atom, or most of evolutionary biology. I honestly can't remember the last time anyone had a theory that held sway for a long time but then was proved abjectly wrong under further analysis.
I hate the term 'survival of the fittest'. Not because it's incorrect, but because the average layperson misinterprets the definition of 'fitness' to only mean 'strength'. And THEN you get into trouble with so-called 'Social Darwinists' that think that the 'fittest' people are the ones on the top with all the money or whatever.
This doesn't make anything that you said incorrect in the least. But 'survival of the fittest' needs to be retired as a phrase so we can stop talking about the wrong things.:P
Evolution is a FACT. The reason why it's termed a 'theory' is because we don't know exactly how it works yet. We know that it works. We can make predictions based on what we know about evolution and confirm those predictions in the lab or through fossil evidence. But we don't know everything, and there are gaps in our knowledge. The theory isn't complete.
Gravity is ALSO a fact. Everything in the observable universe currently obeys the laws of gravitation. Perhaps they won't tomorrow, but all evidence that we have points to gravity working the way that we study it, reaching back to not long after the big bang. But we have NO idea HOW it works. We thought there might be a particle that was the mechanism, but we haven't found it yet. Strings? Branes? We don't know. We've got some fairly vague theories, but that's about it.
That doesn't make gravity not work. Gravity works whether we understand it or not, and so does evolution. We can make predictions based on our knowledge of either, and those predictions are generally confirmed. (When they're not, we adjust our ideas about the theory.)
Don't confuse 'theory' with 'maybe doesn't work'. Maybe it doesn't work quite the way we think, but the enormous preponderance of evidence suggests that it *does* work.
It seems obvious why they've gone to college: to storm out of classes that they feel are blasphemous and draw attention to their fundamentalist beliefs. Effectively, to cause other students into questioning their own beliefs about science and evolution.
If you're not at University to drink, party, hook up, study or otherwise move forward with your life and get new experiences and information with which to re-examine the world, you're there to stir up shit and throw a wrench into the works for other people.
And, frankly, it's not just about these particular Muslim students; I'm sure lots of us that went to University can think of someone that was there that didn't want to learn or grow and effectively just made things awkward and miserable for the rest of us. It's just that these guys did it on the basis of religion.
I'm sure you know this, but I can't let it go because other people might come along and read it: Newton wasn't wrong.
Well, not entirely wrong.
Newton's laws of gravity and motion still work very, very well. If you attempt to calculate the trajectory of a ball in a gravity field given a certain force acting on it, Newton's laws are the ones that you'll use. They're also the ones that will work.
Einstein's work didn't invalidate Newton so much as recontextualize where it was appropriate to use his laws to make predictions. But F=ma continues to function just as well as it did before Einstein said anything in 99% of the applications that are relevant to us.
Slashdot Mirror
Effectively, it has to do with foreign ownership rules. (Ironically, something that the CRTC is responsible for enforcing, which lead us to this problem in the first place.)
So! Because of some legal argle-bargle, Canadian telcos must have majority ownership in Canada. It means that a big US company can't come and set up shop. Nor anyone else from anywhere else. Wind Mobile kinda skirted the rules a bit, but it was a desperate play and it looked like it wasn't going to work for a while there.
So the big telcos can operate with relative impunity because it's effin' expensive to set up national infrastructure in a country like Canada. They were effectively gifted the copper (as I recall) in the first place when it was phone and cable TV lines, and now they've got a stranglehold. This applies in many different areas, as well; Rogers does home internet as well as cable TV and mobile phones. But they're not technically a monopoly because Bell does the same thing. So you've got a few (barely) competing entities that see no reason to lower prices because going to the other guy means you're still bent over the table for exactly the same price, and the only difference is whose name you mutter through clenched teeth.
Wouldn't Apple be the least likely to sell your data? I mean, they've GOT what they want: you on their platform. They don't need to sell your data to anyone—frankly, it probably runs counter to their own interests if they do. If you've already bought into their platform, they'll try to treat you well so you don't jump ship to some other platform, and that's it. Google and Dropbox don't have any other way to monetize you than to blitz you with ads or sell your data because they've got nothing else to sell.
By what mechanism does the market stop pollution?
The problem with everyone that bleats about the market correcting itself is that they forget that the ideal market relies on ideal people that are well informed at all times and have enough information to make a decision.
CO2 is colourless and odourless. How is the average person supposed to know the effects of CO2 if there isn't an expert to tell them that this is a problem? And once the expert has informed them, what recourse does that person have? The government is a way to make decisions on behalf of citizens to protect them and to give them power that they don't have individually. While it's not feasible for EVERYONE in a population to know about the problems CO2 cause, it IS possible for a few people to know and to give their expertise. Then it is the government, acting on behalf of the people (since the people selected the government, or the government is otherwise ostensibly acting in the best interests of the population) that can move to remove these problems that affect the whole population, whether they know it or not.
The government has done this many times, usually through regulation. For instance, there isn't lead in gasoline anymore. We don't have as big a problem with CFCs anymore (though the lingering effects of our past mistakes is still around). Etc.
However, what we're talking about here is something that is both dangerous but to an extent, indispensable. It simply isn't currently possible to maintain our way of life without fossil fuels at the moment. New technology will not be able to upset the status quo until such time as fossil fuels are unavailable because new technology is almost always less efficient and costs more while economies of scale aren't present. And, again, not everyone knows or believes the harm that is being done. This is exactly the sort of thing that the government was meant to take care of.
By levying taxes—and in this case, I believe they should be revenue neutral taxes—they can change behaviour, fix the problem that the market is itself unable to solve because of the flaws of the actors involved, and generally leave us in a better position than when we started.
Governments protect our best interests, and the market protects its OWN interest. There is a reasonable balance to be struck.
I live in Canada. I've lived in Canada all my life (Alberta and Quebec). I can rock a FWD car out of a snowbank that is up to the wheel wells. If I can't move the car with a shovel, a bit of time, and my own effort, most 4WD vehicles wouldn't have made it out of that situation either.
I've driven in blinding snowstorms through the crow's nest pass in the Rockies, and I've been stuck on the top of the Coquihalla with the semis putting the chains on their wheels. I made it through there just the same as they did. All I needed was some winter tyres and a modicum of care.
With traction control systems and some experience, driving in the snow is not a thing that requires 4WD. I know that they're better in the snow and ice, but they're not essential. Even with the car that I have (diesel VW Jetta wagon), which has a very low nose and consequently not much ground clearance, city driving in bad conditions isn't a concern. If it's so bad that I can't move the car, it's too bad to be driving, period.
If you need an SUV or truck—and there are people that do, obviously—then that's fine. But you almost never need one just for day-to-day things driving in the city.
For two people, it's trivially cheaper to buy a movie on blu-ray if you have a big-ish TV and a blu-ray player. I understand that these are fairly big 'ifs', but I happened to already have these things because I own a PS3 and a Plasma TV.
But if those two things are assumed, you can buy a BD movie for $25-$40. Less if it's on sale.
If you hate the movie, you can almost always find someone that's willing to pay at least $10 for it. So now you've got a price range of $15-30 for the movie. (If I decide that I like the movie enough to keep it, the nominal price is divided by the number of times that I watch it. Honestly, I've yet to sell a movie since I don't buy movies that I don't think I'll like.)
Movie tickets around here are up to $14 after tax, I believe. So I'm practically even already, for just one ticket. If there's more than one of you, obviously the amortization gets better very quickly.
I can buy the snacks I want, pause, sit in a comfortable chair, pet my cats or go to the bathroom if I like. I can do almost all of those things at the same time, actually.
To get to a decent movie theatre is a half-hour trip for me, at least, by metro. (That's a $3 cost; that's far cheaper than driving the car and paying for parking, almost certainly.) If I buy the movie from Amazon.ca, it's delivered to my door.
The ONLY thing I miss out on is seeing the movie as a brand new release. But it turns out that sometime in my late 20s, I stopped caring about that. Now that I'm in my mid-30s, the whole movie-going ordeal seems like a tremendous waste of time given all the other things that I'd like to do.
So, to review: I save time and money, and sacrifice a bit of timeliness for incredible convenience. What in the world do they expect to happen with ticket prices?
Bananas! We may very well see the extinction of bananas in the near future. We bred all the seeds out of them and we grow only one kind.
I'll amend that: succumbs or adapts. The arms race ever marches forward.
I'm not sure it's that much of a surprise. They recently found that spider mites are capable of lateral DNA transfer from bacteria and fungi, which is why you can't really stop them for long. The insects in this article aren't spider mites, I realise, but circumventing the protection of plants is to a certain extent the entire PURPOSE of these organisms. I'm not suggesting that they're also capable of this lateral transfer trickery, but they can run experiments* on these plants a lot faster than we can run experiments on them.
*By experiments, I mean that millions of these organisms can fling themselves at this crop until one of them survives and reproduces. They're effectively running a massively parallel biological experiment. If they're not completely wiped out in short order, they'll pretty much always find a way to win. The only thing I know of that's successfully defeated them is honey. Everything else succumbs in time.
I'm just saying antenna problems aren't the exclusive domain of Apple. It's just that the iPhone is so popular and newsworthy that even non-newsworthy things make it to the news. :)
Your argument is incredibly specious.
1) This isn't a freedom of speech argument.
2) Apple has, from the outset, dictated the applications allowed to run on its devices.
Flash, Apple claims, is a battery killer. And they're right. It's brutal. It's a CPU hog on a desktop machine, and a CPU hog on a mobile device is necessarily something that drains the battery faster than normal.
This is the market at work. You can't even cry 'monopoly' here because there are other options, and Apple wasn't using any monopolistic power (which, obviously, it doesn't even have) to promote a competing technology.
Apple doesn't have to let anyone do anything. Apple could have told everyone the only app they could write was for counting how much money Apple makes and everything else would be rejected out of hand, and that STILL would have been well within Apple's right and authority. It would have been a MORONIC business decision, but that's it.
In any case, ultimately, Apple can't stop you from doing anything. Jailbreak your device and write a new flash interpreter and run it under iOS if you can.
Wow, which /. are you reading? At the top, there's this comment that's currently rated +5, informative:
"Apple behaviour is pretty disgusting and, I'd join the embargo 'BUT' damn I've always found their gear to be overhyped and overpriced and basically always gone else where. I'll think you'll find that this is pretty much the trend with the majority of computer geeks.
For what it's worth I vow never to buy an Apple product ;D."
I don't even understand which bit counts as 'informative'. The Apple haters are out in full force with their mod points, too.
I admit, this is a bit old, but on Page 6 of this HTC Incredible manual, it tells you exactly where NOT to put your fingers because it'll interfere with reception.
http://member.america.htc.com/download/Web_materials/Manual/HTC_INCREDIBLE(Verizon)/100421_IncredibleC_VZW_English_Safety-and-Warranty.pdf
Everyone wants you to hold your phone some particular way. :/
I've got no beef against Ms. Hackborn in particular, but it's clear that she has a dog in this hunt. Take her words with as big a grain of salt as you would from someone that works at Apple.
In any case, the fact that Samsung is copying design elements when making its tablet is unrelated to Android. Samsung's own lawyers couldn't differentiate the two devices in court at a distance of 3m. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/2051219/samsung-lawyer-fails-to-differentiate-ipad-and-galaxy-tab-in-court
But putting aside the practical matters (i.e., whether any boycott could even be reasonably mustered), would an Apple boycott really help matters? Let's consider that until Apple got into the iPod business, the music players were all pretty uninspiring. Apple made that a viable bit of industry. The iTunes music store brought us prices for mainstream music that were effectively unheard of previously, and for those of us that were interested in buying digital music instead of finding, er...alternate sources, it finally gave us a place to go.
The iPhone is remarkable mainly in the power it wrested away from the telecoms. Now Samsung can show up and say, "This is the phone we designed. Take it or leave it." Previously, the specs would have been given to Samsung and they would have done the best they could with very little latitude of their own.
Apple disrupts markets. Maybe they shouldn't be such dicks about it after they've wedged themselves into a space, but they're making markets that either don't exist or exist only as a poorly exploited niche.
They didn't 'ban' flash. Well, not broadly. They wouldn't allow it to run on their iOS systems, but you can still get it for your OS X machine. And obviously they didn't ban it on any other device. Flash died because Apple didn't want it sucking up battery life. If it was such a great technology, Apple would have capitulated because customers would have left in droves for flash enabled smartphones, but they didn't.
Flash is a blight. It was a blight TEN YEARS AGO. Adobe decided that they'd spend the last ten years sticking with the buggy, insecure, slow, poorly optimized status quo, and when someone finally called them on it, a few people got hot under the collar about it. And for nothing, I might add, since nobody really seems to care that much.
People on /. have been calling for the demise of Flash for years.
Moderation system is broken today, where something like this gets modded +5 informative. 'Informative'? What information is in this post that's meaningful or relevant? That this person is never going to buy an Apple product? The ";D"?
http://www.amazon.com/Omas-Limited-Phoenix-Fountain-Diamonds/dp/B002K6QB78/ref=sr_1_1?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1324933715&sr=1-1
This fountain pen is $47,000, and only because it's ON SALE.
The normal retail price is $60000. Because I'd like to point this out in all caps, I'll type out the price: SIXTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS.
FOR A PEN.
(I was looking for fountain pens a little while back and discovered this.)
Audiophiles are crazy, but there are apparently crazier people still. You can buy a nice BMW for that money. Or, y'know, pay someone's salary for a year. :/
I don't believe in a GENERATION of failed, overly aggressive 'femi-nazis'. There are bad apples in ever group. Fringes establish. You got some crazy zealots at some point, but 'femi-nazi' is a term coined by boys' club white men threatened by ACTUAL feminists. Nobody ever *really* took the crazy fringes seriously, but there's a body of people out there that are scared of the change that feminism brings, so they whipped up this term to discredit them and demonize the entire feminism movement. I've met so many sex-positive, equal-rights loving women that don't like being called feminists because of that so-called 'femi-nazi' association.
I'm a feminist, too. And I'm a dude. I think you're pretty much bang on for the whole thing except point three. I know you're hardly going for encyclopedia-level reliability here, but the third generation merely made it possible for the fringes to exist which, now that I think about it, is a weird sort of victory in itself.
There're lots of (unilingual, or mostly unilingual) Anglos (like me) that work in software in Quebec (Montreal, specifically). I work with a lot of people that are so fluently multilingual, you'd never know they spoke more than one language if they were speaking to you in English.
Not only is it off by default, apparently it's only allowed to access information at a layer that doesn't give away the farm. It's not recording your keypresses, the sites you visit (which apparently the HTC version does even if you're on WiFi) or anything else that's possibly a significant security risk. Supposedly, it really does act just as it's claimed to in the press releases.
(I'm aware that I use 'apparently' and 'supposedly'; I have no concrete info that I've tested myself, this is just what I've read today.)
My Dad bought a NeXT cube when I was a teenager.
At some point, he decided to get a RAM upgrade. He had the choice between 32MB and 64MB, and he went with the 64MB, but it wasn't much of a choice, since they *cost the same amount*. For some reason, the upgrade cost was per SIMM, irrespective of the actual amount of RAM on it.
As I recall, it was several thousand dollars. But that was hardly relevant for a computer that cost $15000 out of the box (CDN).
To this day, it was one of the finest, most responsive machines I've ever used (and is responsible for my switch to OS X). It could do so much on 25MHz; it makes me sad about how little I can do with 2.8GHz. :/
It's an interesting question.
Most bad science doesn't really persist for long. So once we entered the real scientific era, concepts tended to be good, but too simplistic. So the model of the atom hasn't really been wrong for decades, just imprecise. Similarly with models of the solar system. Basically correct, but not so wrong that they were unworkable.
Really, I think maybe it's just better to point out that the scientific method tends not to entirely invalidate old systems, but make them better and more complete, and the 'failure' of old systems is mainly imprecision. That's certainly the case in terms of Newton, or the Bohr-Rutherford atom, or most of evolutionary biology. I honestly can't remember the last time anyone had a theory that held sway for a long time but then was proved abjectly wrong under further analysis.
I hate the term 'survival of the fittest'. Not because it's incorrect, but because the average layperson misinterprets the definition of 'fitness' to only mean 'strength'. And THEN you get into trouble with so-called 'Social Darwinists' that think that the 'fittest' people are the ones on the top with all the money or whatever.
This doesn't make anything that you said incorrect in the least. But 'survival of the fittest' needs to be retired as a phrase so we can stop talking about the wrong things. :P
Argh.
Evolution is a FACT. The reason why it's termed a 'theory' is because we don't know exactly how it works yet. We know that it works. We can make predictions based on what we know about evolution and confirm those predictions in the lab or through fossil evidence. But we don't know everything, and there are gaps in our knowledge. The theory isn't complete.
Gravity is ALSO a fact. Everything in the observable universe currently obeys the laws of gravitation. Perhaps they won't tomorrow, but all evidence that we have points to gravity working the way that we study it, reaching back to not long after the big bang. But we have NO idea HOW it works. We thought there might be a particle that was the mechanism, but we haven't found it yet. Strings? Branes? We don't know. We've got some fairly vague theories, but that's about it.
That doesn't make gravity not work. Gravity works whether we understand it or not, and so does evolution. We can make predictions based on our knowledge of either, and those predictions are generally confirmed. (When they're not, we adjust our ideas about the theory.)
Don't confuse 'theory' with 'maybe doesn't work'. Maybe it doesn't work quite the way we think, but the enormous preponderance of evidence suggests that it *does* work.
It seems obvious why they've gone to college: to storm out of classes that they feel are blasphemous and draw attention to their fundamentalist beliefs. Effectively, to cause other students into questioning their own beliefs about science and evolution.
If you're not at University to drink, party, hook up, study or otherwise move forward with your life and get new experiences and information with which to re-examine the world, you're there to stir up shit and throw a wrench into the works for other people.
And, frankly, it's not just about these particular Muslim students; I'm sure lots of us that went to University can think of someone that was there that didn't want to learn or grow and effectively just made things awkward and miserable for the rest of us. It's just that these guys did it on the basis of religion.
I'm sure you know this, but I can't let it go because other people might come along and read it: Newton wasn't wrong.
Well, not entirely wrong.
Newton's laws of gravity and motion still work very, very well. If you attempt to calculate the trajectory of a ball in a gravity field given a certain force acting on it, Newton's laws are the ones that you'll use. They're also the ones that will work.
Einstein's work didn't invalidate Newton so much as recontextualize where it was appropriate to use his laws to make predictions. But F=ma continues to function just as well as it did before Einstein said anything in 99% of the applications that are relevant to us.