Price ceilings are generally associated with the left-wing, but that doesn't make them good left-wing policy. There are much better leftist approaches to the problem.
They're a classical example of the leftist stupidity, thinking that you can solve all problems by legislating them away.
(For the record, the right-wing stupidity is pretending market externalities don't exist).
Air Canada now has standard 110 volt power-points available in every seat on their newest planes. I'm sure other airlines are considering similar measures.
That was the first good business decision. He bought it for 50 grand, hired the guy who wrote it originally, then licensed it out to IBM who were looking for an OS for their new 'PC' thing.
But, it was his BASIC implementation that got IBM talking to him in the first place. He was one of the original authors of that.
Geekery got him in the game. Business sense got him the rest of the way.
Ken Lay should be praised for increasing efficiency
Increasing efficiency? What kind of crack are you smoking? He wasted billions of dollars trying to line his, and his cronies pockets.
The problem with you extremist conservatives is you don't realise there's a difference between a free market and capitalism. Capitalism requires a certain amount of governance to keep operating; rules about disclosure of information to investors, or about monopoly positions in a market. Without rules you have a free market anarchy, and everybody loses.
The problem with Ken Lay is the Republicans in Congress spent 8 years dismantling and weakening the rules that kept men like him in check and kept the economy booming. And now we're paying the price for it.
The idea may be old and obvious, but the software and hardware necessary to make this kind of thing truly usable has only developed in recent years. There's a lot of Hard Problems(TM) with respect to user-interaction (good handwriting recognition, for one) that needed to be solved before they can be generally useful, and of course the hardware necessary to run the software.
The hardware isn't anything all that innovative, the power comes from the software.... so removing the software and replacing it with something not designed to run a TabletPC would somewhat negate the point of buying one, wouldn't it?
Seriously, the handwriting recognition is what makes the thing useful. They must have spent a lot of time working on it since IME from playing with the things, the handwriting recognition is way beyond anything else I've seen.
Until someone writes comparable software, putting Linux on it moves it from being a paper replacement to just a laptop with a touchscreen.
I've used them once or twice... the recognition rate improves a lot fairly quickly. I'm not sure whether it's the user adapting to the system or the system adapting to the user.
You have a fundamentally flawed view of money. Money is not meaningless, it is a universal mechanism by which capitalist economies quantify resources. A dollar represents some amount of resources - the actual amount depends on what resource you're trying to aquire, how much of it is available, and how much other people want it. Very basic capitalism.
If Russia doesn't have enough money to fund its space program, does not mean some stupid people decided not to print a few extra pieces of paper. It means that Russia cannot reasonably provide the resources to keep up its part of the ISS bargain. A country can only produce so much, and the Russians have decided that it's more important to build critical infrastructure and to feed people to continue building components for the ISS and blasting them into space.
The only thing more shocking than your ignorance of basic economics and their relevance to society is the fact you got moderated up to 5.
Intel's raw fabrication technology is still several years ahead of AMD. Grove might be pessimistic about the long-term future of Moore's law, but Intel still has a couple of year's headstart and about 5 times the R&D budget. And somehow I think he was looking further than three years into the future with that statement.
Rumours of Intel's demise have been exagerated, I believe.
Wait, you're a big fan of the Alpha so you're in favour of x86-64?
To answer your question, yes, you'll need a OS specifically built for the chip, and a new motherboard. There is some tentative support for x86-64 from a few companies (I believe SuSE).
But this raises the question of, why would you want to? The Alpha is an elegant architecture. x86-64 is a sin against nature.
Sony used to make great products. You always paid a premium for Sony, but in the long-run you got your money's worth (we've got a Sony trinitron tv that's 15 years old and is still in great working condition).
Unfortunately, in the late 90s Sony started to get hammered in their traditionally highly profitable consumer electronics divisions. I think at its worst they only had one profitable division: the Playstation guys.
So what did Sony do? They changed their strategy, and in almost all product lines cut prices, costs and quality to bring back the consumers. It apparently has worked, Sony's making money pretty much across the board, but the quality you get from them now is no different from any other manafacturer, i.e., 'good enough'.
What does this prove? Not that corporations are greedy and trying to rip consumers off, but people simply don't value high-quality consumer electronics anymore. Cheap credit and cheaper manafacturing costs across the board have brought the price of consumer electronics down into the 'impulse purchase' area, and in this price range people want cheap devices that work for a few years, and then get discarded when the latest and greatest comes out.
For those of us that like quality, it's too bad. Sony still has a few good product lines, but they tend to be the very-high end products, where buyers are still thinking long-term.
Which was a horribly stupid decision. Search for printing related patents owned by Microsoft at that time; MS had a far better printer system, and they made a lot of money licensing it out to other companies...but NT shipped with the stupid OS/2 printer subsystem for political reasons.
You mean theory, not theorem. A theorem is the mathematical equivalent to a law, i.e., something that has been proven to always be true.
In practice, it's actually stronger than law. Unfortunately, a number of things are called 'laws' when there aren't any true laws. For example, the laws of thermodynamics - it's just a theory (although a damn well trusted one). AFAIK, nothing is called a theorem without actually being one.
The counter-argument is that formal systems (such as modern computers) have logical limitations that are not evident in human cognition.
How do you know there aren't logical limitations inherant in human cognition? I think by definition making that claim without a very complex and subtle analysis is absurd, and cognitive science isn't nearly up to that level yet.
That doesn't sound right. 3,718,005 sounds like the total ethnic population of Toronto.
And here's why... You're totally ignoring the category of 'Canadian'. Canadian != White. I know a lot of people who you would consider ethnic who fill out their census forms with Canadian.
If I were in one of those cars- probably not- we would have been heading to the hospital as rapidly as possible. If I had been in one of the many, many cars there at the time. That would have been a different story. I would have stopped and killed him. Maybe save a life or 2 while I'm at it. That's what I mean by an individual's responsibility towards the whole. If 10 more people like me had been there- even if all 3 hit had been packing, that leaves 7 to take care of business.
So, fundamentally you're in favour of vigilantism?
So what happens if you miss the guy, and end up in a random gun fight in the middle of the street? How many people will you accidentally kill defending yourself from the crazed lunatic who has now turned his full attentions on you?
What happens when a similarly minded person sees you running up to someone randomly on the street and shooting him? I hope you don't mind when they blow your brains out; how were they supposed to know you weren't the killer, and were actually trying to save people? And how are you supposed to know this good samaritan isn't the first guy's buddy and end up in a gun-fight on the middle of a public street?
This is why this whole argument breaks down. All vigilantism does is create anarchy and chaos. If you want to save lives you should try to evacuate the area and call the cops. Let the guys with proper training and uniforms deal with the psycho.
So the price of the guns has increased. You admit this would make it harder to obtain guns. This isn't an absolutist argument; we aren't saying that by making guns harder to aquire you're going to completely disarm the criminal element, but you are going to disarm some. And the harder you make it, the more criminals are disarmed. If you can't understand this, you really should take a course in basic economics.
The problem, of course, is that the supply of weapons used in crime is made up, in large part, from guns that were legally bought by law-abiding citizens, but then stolen. Every time your house gets robbed when your'e out and your hand-gun gets stolen, that's another gun in the hands of someone not very nice.
A good example of this is the UK. The UK is a pretty violent place these days, violent crime in general is higher per-capita than it is in the US (significantly higher, I believe). However, the murder-rate is still much lower. Hand-guns have always been difficult to acquire in the UK, consequently those that are available are pretty expensive and out of the reach of normal criminals. For the most part the gun violence has been limited to organized crime and drug-dealing, who are far too busy shooting each other than to engage in petty theft. Unfortunately, this is starting to slip, as the british customs are dropping the ball; the supply is increasing due to guns smuggled in from eastern europe.
Of course, an outright ban on hand-guns would do crazy things in the short-term (see Australia). It would take a long time for the markets to reach their new equillibrium after such a ban.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong way around there. Also, Ford bought Jaguar.
And since then, the quality of cars coming out of both companies has dropped noticably.
Price ceilings are generally associated with the left-wing, but that doesn't make them good left-wing policy. There are much better leftist approaches to the problem.
They're a classical example of the leftist stupidity, thinking that you can solve all problems by legislating them away.
(For the record, the right-wing stupidity is pretending market externalities don't exist).
The stop telling jokes when they stop being funny.
Air Canada now has standard 110 volt power-points available in every seat on their newest planes. I'm sure other airlines are considering similar measures.
That was the first good business decision. He bought it for 50 grand, hired the guy who wrote it originally, then licensed it out to IBM who were looking for an OS for their new 'PC' thing.
But, it was his BASIC implementation that got IBM talking to him in the first place. He was one of the original authors of that.
Geekery got him in the game. Business sense got him the rest of the way.
The problem with you extremist conservatives is you don't realise there's a difference between a free market and capitalism. Capitalism requires a certain amount of governance to keep operating; rules about disclosure of information to investors, or about monopoly positions in a market. Without rules you have a free market anarchy, and everybody loses.
The problem with Ken Lay is the Republicans in Congress spent 8 years dismantling and weakening the rules that kept men like him in check and kept the economy booming. And now we're paying the price for it.
If at first you don't succede, try try again.
If at second you don't succede, try try again.
If at... ah hell, you get the picture.
They're bloody persitent, you've got to give them that. :P
So yes, I'd expect a wacom pen would work.:P
The idea may be old and obvious, but the software and hardware necessary to make this kind of thing truly usable has only developed in recent years. There's a lot of Hard Problems(TM) with respect to user-interaction (good handwriting recognition, for one) that needed to be solved before they can be generally useful, and of course the hardware necessary to run the software.
Seriously, the handwriting recognition is what makes the thing useful. They must have spent a lot of time working on it since IME from playing with the things, the handwriting recognition is way beyond anything else I've seen.
Until someone writes comparable software, putting Linux on it moves it from being a paper replacement to just a laptop with a touchscreen.
I've used them once or twice... the recognition rate improves a lot fairly quickly. I'm not sure whether it's the user adapting to the system or the system adapting to the user.
And it would have been if it hadn't been for cutbacks. And don't go blaming just the Russians, NASA's funding has also been cut a lot in recent years.
You have a fundamentally flawed view of money. Money is not meaningless, it is a universal mechanism by which capitalist economies quantify resources. A dollar represents some amount of resources - the actual amount depends on what resource you're trying to aquire, how much of it is available, and how much other people want it. Very basic capitalism.
If Russia doesn't have enough money to fund its space program, does not mean some stupid people decided not to print a few extra pieces of paper. It means that Russia cannot reasonably provide the resources to keep up its part of the ISS bargain. A country can only produce so much, and the Russians have decided that it's more important to build critical infrastructure and to feed people to continue building components for the ISS and blasting them into space.
The only thing more shocking than your ignorance of basic economics and their relevance to society is the fact you got moderated up to 5.
Rumours of Intel's demise have been exagerated, I believe.
To answer your question, yes, you'll need a OS specifically built for the chip, and a new motherboard. There is some tentative support for x86-64 from a few companies (I believe SuSE).
But this raises the question of, why would you want to? The Alpha is an elegant architecture. x86-64 is a sin against nature.
Unfortunately, in the late 90s Sony started to get hammered in their traditionally highly profitable consumer electronics divisions. I think at its worst they only had one profitable division: the Playstation guys.
So what did Sony do? They changed their strategy, and in almost all product lines cut prices, costs and quality to bring back the consumers. It apparently has worked, Sony's making money pretty much across the board, but the quality you get from them now is no different from any other manafacturer, i.e., 'good enough'.
What does this prove? Not that corporations are greedy and trying to rip consumers off, but people simply don't value high-quality consumer electronics anymore. Cheap credit and cheaper manafacturing costs across the board have brought the price of consumer electronics down into the 'impulse purchase' area, and in this price range people want cheap devices that work for a few years, and then get discarded when the latest and greatest comes out.
For those of us that like quality, it's too bad. Sony still has a few good product lines, but they tend to be the very-high end products, where buyers are still thinking long-term.
The same way IBM and its laywers maintained full control over DOS? Riiiight. :P
Which was a horribly stupid decision. Search for printing related patents owned by Microsoft at that time; MS had a far better printer system, and they made a lot of money licensing it out to other companies...but NT shipped with the stupid OS/2 printer subsystem for political reasons.
In practice, it's actually stronger than law. Unfortunately, a number of things are called 'laws' when there aren't any true laws. For example, the laws of thermodynamics - it's just a theory (although a damn well trusted one). AFAIK, nothing is called a theorem without actually being one.
How do you know there aren't logical limitations inherant in human cognition? I think by definition making that claim without a very complex and subtle analysis is absurd, and cognitive science isn't nearly up to that level yet.
ASP.NET is fundamentally a pretty different (and much more advanced) technology than ASP.
And here's why... You're totally ignoring the category of 'Canadian'. Canadian != White. I know a lot of people who you would consider ethnic who fill out their census forms with Canadian.
So, fundamentally you're in favour of vigilantism?
So what happens if you miss the guy, and end up in a random gun fight in the middle of the street? How many people will you accidentally kill defending yourself from the crazed lunatic who has now turned his full attentions on you?
What happens when a similarly minded person sees you running up to someone randomly on the street and shooting him? I hope you don't mind when they blow your brains out; how were they supposed to know you weren't the killer, and were actually trying to save people? And how are you supposed to know this good samaritan isn't the first guy's buddy and end up in a gun-fight on the middle of a public street?
This is why this whole argument breaks down. All vigilantism does is create anarchy and chaos. If you want to save lives you should try to evacuate the area and call the cops. Let the guys with proper training and uniforms deal with the psycho.
Wimpy British thugs. :^P
So the price of the guns has increased. You admit this would make it harder to obtain guns. This isn't an absolutist argument; we aren't saying that by making guns harder to aquire you're going to completely disarm the criminal element, but you are going to disarm some. And the harder you make it, the more criminals are disarmed. If you can't understand this, you really should take a course in basic economics.
The problem, of course, is that the supply of weapons used in crime is made up, in large part, from guns that were legally bought by law-abiding citizens, but then stolen. Every time your house gets robbed when your'e out and your hand-gun gets stolen, that's another gun in the hands of someone not very nice.
A good example of this is the UK. The UK is a pretty violent place these days, violent crime in general is higher per-capita than it is in the US (significantly higher, I believe). However, the murder-rate is still much lower. Hand-guns have always been difficult to acquire in the UK, consequently those that are available are pretty expensive and out of the reach of normal criminals. For the most part the gun violence has been limited to organized crime and drug-dealing, who are far too busy shooting each other than to engage in petty theft. Unfortunately, this is starting to slip, as the british customs are dropping the ball; the supply is increasing due to guns smuggled in from eastern europe.
Of course, an outright ban on hand-guns would do crazy things in the short-term (see Australia). It would take a long time for the markets to reach their new equillibrium after such a ban.