And plenty of people are stupid and shortsighted. What's your point?
My point is that you're being insular, arrogant, stupid, and shortsighted yourself. Everyone is not like you. DRM is not necessarily a bad thing all the time. True, it's far worse than totally unfettered access to digital content, but the media companies are not going to release content in an uncontrolled fashion. Of course, we have the wonderful pirate culture to blame for that, since they've shown themselves to be oh so responsible when it comes to observing the rights of intellectual property holders. But I digress. The point here is that DRM which allows at least limited copying is far, far better than things like DeCSS which allow no legal copying whatsoever. You can argue otherwise 'til you're blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. If anything, you're just pouting because you can't violate copyrights anymore....and bunches of others that I haven't bothered to list.
Perhaps you missed the part about "modern 3-D accelerated games" in my requirements. Many in your list have a bit of age on them. Try harder next time.
E allows the average user to be subjected to unwanted advertisements.
Perhaps you're unaware of the existence of an integrated pop-up blocker in IE? Or the fact that ad-removal options do exist for IE? Besides, this is no more a "broken" feature than Firefox's lack of support for ActiveX Controls. You're grasping at straws here.
IE allows spyware and adware to take over the average user's computer.
And Firefox on Linux is immune to this...how? A number of exploits have surfaced for FF on Linux. Several of them allowed arbitrary code execution. Are you going to be stupid enough to suggest that all the bugs in FF are gone now? That there will never be another exploit? Or, going further, that FF is somehow immune to social engineering practices that trick users into downloading malicious content? You're making a huge fool of yourself here and not even remotely presenting a challenge to me in this argument.
IE allows the average user's computer to get viruses. IE puts the average user at extreme risk of identity theft.
Blah blah blah. You keep spouting the same old tired lines. I will remind you that FF, Opera, Safari, and every other browser known to man either currently has or recently had numerous exploits available that would allow such as this. If you want to be stupid enough to claim that this will never happen again, go ahead. It will simply reinforce the idea that you're so blinded by anti-MS hatred that you're unable to make a rational decision in this matter. And even if you could somehow magically make FF/Opera/Linux/OSX/whatever immune to code exploits, all of these are still vulnerable to socially engineering an ususpecting, ignorant user into doing all manner of nefarious things to their own machine. Even non-root users can do a lot of damage, especially to themselves (deletion of user home directory would hurt, now, wouldn't it? And that can't be stopped by simply restricting root access because the user has rw privs to his/her home dir). Gosh, you didn't think about that, did you? Now that I mention it, you didn't think much at all about this whole concept, did you? You just reacted emotionally, like a good/. myrmidon.
ot to mention that by now the number of websites that don't work in Firefox are negligable.
Oh really? You don't surf much, do you? I use FF every day (I'm using it right now). I come across at least one or two every day that don't render properly in FF but look fine in IE. Sure, FF is trying to do things the "web standard" way and IE is doing things the "Microsoft" way, but my original point stands unmolested: none of this matters to the end user. If it renders properly in IE, it doesn't matter if the site had to be coded in object-oriented FORTRAN. The user doesn
...that these practices are not criminal according to US law. Seems to me this is corporate greed at ist best.
It's called "freedom," a word you aren't apparently familiar with. In this country, people are free to not buy Windows Vista, Halo PC, or whatever if they don't want to, thus voting with their dollars. Microsoft can only be as greedy as the market will allow it. If the market decides Microsoft's products are no longer worth the money Microsoft is demanding, Microsoft will lose customers. It's that simple. Such a pity that you think goverment is somehow required to solve all your piddling little problems.
This negates all the improvements you just listed, and more.
That is your opinion only. There are plenty of people out there who find nothing wrong with the DRM at all because (gasp!) it allows them to do whatever they want to do with it (i.e. make backups, etc.) Just because it prevents you from ripping the latest movie and giving it to all your friends free of charge doesn't mean some people don't find it the least be intrusive...or even less intrusive than the current DeCSS since it offers no legal way to copy it at all.
Not to mention that they shouldn't be bothering with DirectX at all, but instead should be implementing a standard like OpenGL, etc.,
OpenGL? Oh, you mean that graphics standard run by the woefully-lethargic standards body that took years to move from one point release to the next? The standard that came to have almost as many proprietary extensions as it did standard ones? OpenGL was a great thing, and it could've remained a great thing. The problem is, it didn't keep pace with graphics card development and gamer interests, largely due to its glacial roots in professional OpenGL cards. I should know because I have had many such cards over the years. The point here is that Microsoft put DirectX in place and pushed it farther and faster than OpenGL could. The initial DirectX was a disaster and it really didn't come into its own until about DirectX7. Today, DirectX9 is the "standard" whether you like it or not. If you doubt that, just see how many modern 3D-accelerated games you can run without it. QED.
shouldn't have broken IE in the first place
Other than failing a variety of tests that also make Firefox puke (ie ACID test), please explain how IE is "broken" in a way that matters to the average user. Every website on the planet that entertains customers QA's their site on IE first and all other browsers second -- if at all. You stand a much higher chance of getting a non-functional or poorly formatted web page using Firefox or Opera than with using IE. Oh, sure, IE implements things in a non-standard way, but that doesn't matter to the end user! They just care that their pages look right and don't care one whit what coding gymnastics you went through to get it that way. You can get all high 'n mighty about standard-this and standard-that, but it doesn't matter one hill of beans. If the vast majority of people use something, it's generally a de-facto standard. I know that offends your puritanicalism, but it's true.
and shouldn't need an anti-spyware tool since it's only because of the fundamental flaws in the OS that spyware exists anyway!
So are you implying it's impossible to construct a spyware tool for another OS like, say, OS X or Linux? If so, would you be willing to bet a year's salary on that? Don't be so foolish. Your narrow-mindedness is blinding you to reality. Take a step back and remember that this is software, not a religion. Microsoft is a competitor, not the Nazi party. Quit taking this stuff so personally and your judgement won't be so badly marred by your emotions.
Re:Moon Base Bush is pie in the sky
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Back to the Moon
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Is one manned moon mission (estimate $100 billion) worth 200 mid-sized science missions (at 500 million each)? Even if my numbers are a bit off, my thinking says no.
Yes, it is worth it, although your opinion will undoubtedly differ from mine. Why is it worth it? Because although we'd get less "hard science" from a manned mission, ultimately the human race must leave its cradle. Unmanned missions offer us the luxury of not having to improve our life support and propulsion systems, because a probe needs no life support and doesn't care if it take five to ten years to get to its destination.
Sooner or later, though, we're going to have to expand beyond this rock we're currently on. The longer we delay manned interplanetary expeditions, the longer it's going to take us to settle something other than Earth. And there's the not-insubstantial benefit of getting all of humanity's eggs out of one basket, so to speak. After all, we're just one planetary catastrophe from extinction just like our dinosaur predecessors. That shouldn't sit well with you if you're the least bit interested in humans eventually colonizing space.
To paraphrase JFK, we should send men (and women) out into space not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Risk -- and its rewards -- moves the species forward. Exploring the universe by unmanned proxy is beneath us if we seek to inherit the stars.
It was a bug. It affected Word, and I experienced it first hand at work.
Having had over 2,000 desktops under my group, we never had any such issue. You can't find a KB article on it, so that would tend to indicate that it was something specific to you and not generally widespread. Thus, you have no business blaming it on Microsoft, although you do it anyway. I'm sure it just suits your purpose do to so. You probably blame Bush for high gas prices as well, don't you?
Well, what I was thinking was a team contracted just for that purpose.
Perhaps you missed the part where I stated "You just paid developers to rewrite something that already worked just fine. Great use of company resources! What a way to save money!"
OK, OS cost is the same, what about office Pro, and Acrobat Full version for a large amount of users.
Office Pro costs, when purchased in bulk with corporate licensing discounts, are not any more expensive than buying annual support options for something like StarOffice 8. Acrobat Full edition is rarely needed by anyone when the PDF printer available in Acrobat Elements is available for about $20 per desktop license. Again, though, bulk licensing purchases of something like Acrobat are far cheaper than you are apparently aware of.
Who mentioned bugs? You were refering to the robustness?
Perhaps you're unaware that bugs cause crashes, which is also referred to as "downtime," the lack of which is a measure of robustness. Were you asleep the day they taught computers in computer school?
Windows users are assumed to have administrator rights by many software companies it seems. Not true for Linux. Linux has better facilities for giving partial root access to users.
What developers assume is in no way Microsoft's fault. Using your logic, if I wrote an app that needlessly required root access in order to function under Linux, it's the fault of Linux, not me.
As for Linux have "better facilities" for non-root access, again you're wrong. It's quite easy to assign a users a locked-down profile on a box to the point where they're unable to alter any vital systems settings and unable to access protected areas of the machine...just like Linux. The point that not everyone does so does not invalidate the fact that the capability does exist. You are apparently ignorant of this fact...among many others, I'd say.
No, I blame the registry and MS Office over integration into the operating system.
So a third party developer makes their product integrate improperly with a published, codified, well-known spec like the Windows Registry, and it's somehow Microsoft's fault? While I'll admit I'm no big fan of the registry, your logic is absolutely absurd to the point of silliness. Using your argument, I could defame Linux immediately by writing a bunch of applications that flout established app integration rules like shared libraries and such. Hey, it's not my fault I wrote an app that causes Linux to kernel panic, it's the fault of Linux! Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world.
Ha ha ha ha, sorry, had to share a laugh with all the other Linux people about that reboot as often Windows line. Let's see, upgrade the browser, no restart, upgrade the office client, no restart, change UI language, all apps subsequently opened are in that language, no restart.
Your ignorance is showing once again. Let's see: we use Firefox as our browser, so upgrading it doesn't require a restart. We can upgrade Office without a restart (where in the blue hell did you come up with that idiotic nonsense anyway?). Changing the UI language does require a restart, but in all fairness changing it in XWindows requires to you restart X, so there's no advantage there. Look, your bias is clear here to the point that you're making absolute falsifications to support your unsupportable argument. Stop now. You are making a total fool of yourself.
I will be abl
Re:Moon Base Bush is pie in the sky
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Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
A very valid point. However, a simple look at NASA's budget will quickly show where the dollars are flowing. It's to the Shuttle (that fatally-flawed boondoggle result of some earlier 1970's technological compromises) and the ISS (that fatally-flawed boondoggle result of late 1990's downsizing of Space Station Freedom). Basically, NASA claims we need a Shuttle to service the space station and yet we need a space station to give the Shuttle somewhere to go. It's a circular justification that benefits almost no one except the various contractors involved in both projects.
Take the entire Shuttle and ISS budget and redirect it to a moon shot, moon base, and manned mission to Mars. Things would happen a lot faster and, quite likely, with greater efficiency.
While you're correct that greater-than-two-socket mobos require 8xx Opterons instead of 2xx ones, you're not quite correct with regards to pricing. The price differential for an Opteron 8xx versus a Xeon MP is rather substantial. For example, an Opteron 880 2.4GHz dual core chip is listed on pricewatch for $1,349. A Xeon MP 3.66GHz w/ 1MB of L2 goes for $1,799.00 -- and that's for a single-core part. Doing some quick math, we find that a four-socket setup of 880 Opterons (eight cores total) would cost you $5,396. You could get four Xeon MP's for $7,196, but that would yield you only four cores and much, much lower performance. You could go with an eight-way Xeon MP setup if you can find one, but that would cost $14,392, not to mention the amazing cost and scarcity of eight-way mobos. That's a $9,000 price premium for Intel.
Switching to dual-core Xeon MP's helps a bit, but not a lot. A dual-core 3GHz Xeon MP (2x 2MB L2 cache) sets you back $3,501 per chip. Getting four of them brings the tab to $14,004. So you save about $400 over getting eight single-core Xeon MP's, and you'd probably save about $1,000-$2,000 on the motherboard. You're still more than double the cost of the Opteron 8xx setup, and no matter how you slice it, a 3GHz Xeon core on a 667MHz system bus has difficulty competing with a 2.4GHz Opteron core on a 1GHz HyperTransport bus.
Re:Moon Base Bush is pie in the sky
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Back to the Moon
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The whole "back to the Moon" thing is a load of garbage.
Your short-sightedness is amazing here. "There's nothing more to learn on the Moon"? Where do you get that from? We've sent precisely six manned missions to the moon in all of human history. Only twelve humans have actually walked on it. Almost none of them had a strong scientific background (although many learned it in order to be more effective). Yet we know everything there is to know about the moon according to you. Your hubris is absolutely mind-boggling.
Experts have long admitted that launching a mission to Mars from the Moon is far more difficult than doing it from here.
Umm...exactly who is proposing we launch a Mars mission from the Moon? Bush sure isn't, and neither is any other sane person. To build up a launch infrastructure on the Moon would be a multi-decade endeavor and would likely eclipse a Mars mission for sheer complexity and cost.
No, the Moon is a beta test site, if you will. No human has left low Earth orbit for almost four decades! All the engineers who made Apollo work are either dead or retired. Our heavy lift capacity is completely moribund. With but few exceptions, we're going to have to learn a bunch of things all over again. Which is a better place to learn these things, a spot that's only a couple of days away from the Earth via free-return trajectory, or a spot that's months away with no such option? It doesn't take much more intelligence than a turnip to understand the former is far more advantageous than the latter. It's safer, it'll cost less, and we'll get quicker "knowledge returns".
Once we rediscover how to get to the Moon, setting up a moonbase will essentially be a "dry run" for setting up a Mars habitat. True, the lunar surface and Martian surface don't have a lot in common, but they're both immensely rugged and challenging environments to construct even a sand castle. Learning how to build a moonbase will teach us in no small part how to build a Mars base. Or would you rather we get to Mars first then try to figure all this out then, when astronauts are beyond any easy help from Earth?
NASA has become the "Santa Claus" of the U.S. Government. Keep the children excited and maybe they'll think there really is a future, after all.
While I'll freely admit NASA is merely a vast sinkhole for funds and functioning solely as a reason to have a space station right now, the return to the Moon does not fit that category. There is a future if ostriches like yourself would only see it. Instead, your cynicism and politcal bias appears to be clouding what might otherwise be a capability for sound judgement on your part.
Tech Guy: Well, that's true. We are trying to avoid future fiascoes like when legal upgraded to 2003 as soon as it came out, remember that? Once they edited a document all the office 2000 users, the other 95% of the firm, couldn't open them.
Since Microsoft didn't alter file formats between Office 2000 and Office 2003, this is a complete and total lie. Either that or you're so woefully out of date that you don't realize it. There was a problem from Office 97 to Office 2000, but if you have to go back nearly a decade to find a problem with upgrades, you're really having to reach.
We also have had a development team that incorporated all the macros you use into the office suite itself! Because it's open source they could tailor them to the software better. The old macros took too long right? On the new suit the functions take less than half the time!
Gee, it must be nice to have a development team sitting around with nothing to do. Real businesses have these people tasked with this thing called "work" which is required to keep the company going, and they don't have time to be mucking around adding features to a new program that's suppose to replace the old program that already had those features! And as for your "we fixed the macros to make them better," that's kind of silly because it presupposes the old macros were somehow wrong. What if they weren't? You just paid developers to rewrite something that already worked just fine. Great use of company resources! What a way to save money!
Tech Guy: True, but it is cheaper. The OS, office suite, and Acrobat we won't be paying for make a big difference. The initial upgrade will be expensive, productivity will be lost to start, but the stability of the platform and the over all lack of downtime will save us tones long run. The projected cost to upgrade to Windows Vista are off the scale! We would have to replace 80% or our hardware! And we won't really have to worry about viruses!
Cheaper? How? RHEL costs roughly the same as Windows, and ongoing support contract costs are roughly the same. The stability of the platform and lack of downtime will save in the long run? Again, you pre-suppose that people are having problems with the platform to begin with. Well run shops don't have workstations that crash all the time because they buy quaility machines preloaded with all the right drivers and they don't tinker with them. Driver problems cause 99% of all the crashes in Windows, but drivers can take down Linux just as easily. And since most companies spend significantly less time and effort developing and troubleshooting their Linux drivers vs. their Windows drivers, you stand a greater likelihood of getting something half-baked.
As for Vista upgrade costs, customers on Software Assurance pay nothing for the upgrade. Those without it will pay and arm and a leg, that's for sure, but very few companies buy their software separately any more. They buy the OS during hardware refreshes. This means that in one fell swoop it destroys your argument completely, because the new OS will be bundled with the cost of the machine (and it's a negligible cost compared to the $2,500 purchase cost) and the new hardware will automatically be capable of running the new OS. Most companies are on a 3-5 year refresh cycle already, so this is not anywhere near the issue you're trying to make it out to be. Clearly you have no idea how corporate IT functions.
You can never be immune to viruses. As more firms switch to Linux there will undoubtedly be more viruses, but the basic nature of Linux make it's more robust.
Bullshit. Analysis of bug trends has shown that bugs happen in Linux at roughly the same rates as Windows. Windows bugs get more press because (gasp!) there are more Windows PC's out there.
Remember how I had to make you administrator of your machine so you could run that accounting package? About 30% of the machines in our branch have some software that requ
Based on my experience (long time Linux user, but I am now quite comfortable using Windows too), I believe that Windows folks should switch to Linux only if they have strong reasons for doing so. These could be not wanting to pay for software, a better programming environment, security, etc. Unless there is some personal motivation, people will not want to put in the effort to learn to use a new operating system.
Look, I'm the I.T. Director for a large company. I have a lot of computers to manage. Every year I have to put together budget for hardware, software, training, and maintenance. Every year, a sizable portion of that budget goes to Microsoft. I don't like it one little bit, and if someone told me I could somehow get the exact same software functionality for free in another package, I'd carve out that Microsoft Licensing line item in a microsecond.
But reality intrudes. My company uses a number of pieces of software, some off the shelf, some custom. None of them are available for or customized for Linux. Therefore, despite all protestations and gesticulations by the Linux mavens, it simply isn't a viable option for me or the hordes of users I'm trying to serve. I don't care what anyone says, if the OS cannot run the applications I require it to run, it is not better, it is useless! Heresy here on/., I know, but it's the truth, unalloyed and unvarnished with rose colored thoughts.
For those who can easily move their apps over to Linux -- or if OTS packages are available for your chosen app -- you have my envy. But no one had better tell me Linux is better than what I have now. It isn't. It can't be, because it cannot do what I need it to do. It's not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of the software developers who do not yet support it, but the end result is still the same. Wishful thinking cannot and will not change that.
"Nannying" usually refers to things where the government tries to regulate things that will harm only yourself. Like forcing you to use the seatbelt in your car. In these cases, I agree that government should stay out of peoples' lives. I would even go further and make it legal to use most drugs, for instance.
Agreed on all points.
But the problem with dumping toxic waste into the landscape is that it hurts others, and that is not something we should allow. Even the most libertarian society needs some rules against ruthless behaviour that affects your fellow citizen.
Agreed as well, as that is a proper function of government. Here is my definition of how laws ought to be structured: you should be free to perform any action you can possibly want so long as that action does not deprive someone else of their life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. In your toxic dump scenario, if I owned a stretch of land and wanted to allow someone to dump toxic stuff on it and pay me for the privilege, that's my right. However, my rights stop at the borders of my land -- and that includes the air above and groundwater below. It should be legal for me to do whatever I want with that land insofar as I take the appropriate steps to make sure it never seeps beyond my land. If it does, the surrounding landowners now have cause to hold me completely and totally responsible for any and all costs required to rectify the situation. If it is technologically impossible for me to prevent such seepage, then I should be prevented from using the area as a toxic dump. There you go, yin and yang, perfect and equal. And government need be only invovled in the most peripheral fashion.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, you'd be surprised by the amount of trouble "normal" people are willing to go through just to avoid learning new things. Windows-users especially.
And this is where you ran off the rails with your point. "Avoid learning new things?" Here, take a very short walk with me down to a "normal" user:
Tech Guy: Here, Mr. User, we're going to give you a new operating system and a completely new set of applications with which to perform your duties.
Mr. User: OK! Tell me, what does it do that's new or useful?
Tech Guy: Well, it won't crash like Windows!
Mr. User: Well, but I've been using Windows XP now for about the last three years, and it doesn't crash much if at all. What else does this new OS do?
Tech Guy: Well, it has all new applications!
Mr. User: You mean it doesn't have Office 2003?
Tech Guy: Uh, well, no, it doesn't. It has this other application suite that's just as good! Maybe even better!
Mr. User: But it looks very different to me! The user interface will require me to get used to it, which will reduce my productivity for a little while. My existing documents might look different in this new suite. Further, all the advanced features such as macros probably don't carry over to this new app. That's a real bummer because I depend on those features to do my job. Does this suite do anything any better than Office 2003 that would allow me to offset this loss of productivity? In other words, is it giving me anything new to offset the costs of moving to it?
Tech Guy: Well, uh...it's free!
Mr. User: Hey, bud, I work in accounting. We saw the invoices for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the office suite. You're paying for support for this stuff. It's not free.
Tech Guy: It's immune to viruses!
Mr. User: You said the same thing about the Mac's down in the art department, yet they're running anti-virus software, aren't they? And your buddy on the helpdesk told me that last week Apple patched 43 separate flaws in their OS, many of which allowed complete takeover of the Mac much like a Windows virus. Do you honestly think your new OS/app combo is going to be immune to all viruses over time? Besides, you bought anti-virus software for all the Windows PC's several years ago with annual subscriptions to virus patterns. We haven't been hit by a virus in a long, long time because of that. So, explain to me again what the advantages are here?
Tech Guy: But...but...listen here, you obstinate fool! It's better, I say! And don't you dare argue with me because I know more than you! I have the superior intellect here, and you're just a lowly, unintelligent (sneers) user.
Mr. User: So let me see if I understand you here. You want to give me something different, different enough that I'm going to have change my work habits in order to accomodate it. It's designed to fix crashing problems that I don't have. It's free but it costs money to support. And even once I get used to it all and it's all paid for, it won't do anything that I can't already do with the stuff we already have, that's already paid for, and that everyone is already trained on and familiar with.
Tech Guy: But it's better! It's open! I understand these arcane things in ways you cannot hope to comprehend!
Mr. User: Two words for you, buddy: de-caff. You should try it sometime.
The situation's similar in Europe but over here we don't all have the knee-jerk "reaction against all legislation as a point of principle".
You exaggerate to make your point. I'm a Libertarian. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction against all legislation. However, government should be restricted to performing the absolute minimum number of roles as is possible without compromising personal freedoms and responsibilites. In short -- and with but a few exceptions -- government should never be allowed to perform a duty that any non-governmental entity could not perform adequately on its own. National defense comes to mind, as does law enforcement. But mandating battery recycling standards? Last time I checked our Constitution, that clause wasn't in there. Nor should it be inferred that the "Necessary and Proper" clause allows government such sweeping, ill-defined powers. You guys on the other side of the pond don't have our Constitution (more's the pity), so there's no easy correlation. My point, however, stands regardless of this, as I feel the EU Constitution is far too statist.
That's not to say we agree with everything imposed on us but it is recognised that sometimes the actions of the economically powerful need to be constrained by the [representatives of] the people.
This sounds disturbingly close to your average class-warfare rhetoric. "Constrain" the power of the "economically powerful"? Pray tell, how does someone become "economically powerful"? Oh, that's right, people choose to purchase their goods and services. Here's a fundamental fact you fail to address: power is not taken, power is given. Consumers choose to give power by using the power of their wallets. That power can be removed by consumer consensus at any time. Even Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, could be reduced to mere mortal status should the computing industry consumers decide en masse to shift to a different solution such as Linux/OpenOffice. The power of the consumer prevents Bill Gates from charging $10,000 a copy for Windows. Likewise, the ubiquity of Windows prevents consumers from easily moving to another platform. The two powers keep each other in check to varying degrees, but they do prevent massive abuses. Government is not required here.
Market forces are good up to a point but they do have intrinsic limitations:
Market forces only have intrinsic limitations if you restrict the period of time you're examining. Over a long enough time, however, market forces always win. Soviet-style communism flouted free-market principles for the better part of about eight decades, but eventually the system could not support its contradictions and collapsed. In fact, it can be argued that all artificial (i.e. government mandated) attempts to mess with the free market are doomed to failure, as the market will always self-correct even with outside interference. Smaller interferences take longer to fail that large ones. The problem with your ideas is not the free market, it is a lack of patience to let the natural ebb and flow of supply and demand to do its job.
Because the eco-nazi, nanny-statists will have none of it. You are just a drone that needs to be dictated to.
My point exactly. Humans who cast away their personal responsibilities so cavalierly are not deserving of the title "sentient" if you ask me. I would classify them on the same level as slaves except slaves do not give up their freedoms voluntarily. Nanny-statists do.
The problem is the next guy who doesn't give a shit.
Then we, as the human race, get what we deserve by not giving a shit. It is not the job of government to "nanny" us. I realize that's a popular way to use government today, but it is a very bad role for government to be given power to exercise over.
Side observation: isn't it funny how those who are so quick to endorse the concept of majority rule (i.e. a true democracy) are so quick to cast it away "for the common good"? After all, if the vast majority of people want something, most liberals think they ought to get it. Why should environmentally-damaging products be any different? Food for thought.
If it passes, it will be interesting to see how this affects such devices as MP3 players that generally do not have removeable rechargeable batteries.
If you define interesting as "it will increase the overall price with respect to current units, and the increased amount of government regulation and oversight which will require additional tax funds," then yes, I agree with you, it's quite interesting.
Look, I'm as keen to recycle as the next guy, but since when did government become the solution to all problems? Here's a radical, way-far-out-there idea: if you want the battery industry to change, refuse to purchase devices that are non-recyclable! Nothing stirs an industry quite so quickly -- or so efficiently -- as a consumer revolt. We get greener products, the industry adapts to deliver what we want, and there's no intrusive government leaning over somebody's shoulder telling them what to do. What an elegant solution! It's a pity the knee-jerk reaction these days -- regardless of what continent or island group you're on -- is to scream "Here's a problem! We must demand that government do more to fix it!"
I think his point was that the Shakey Camera Gimmick(tm) has been used and overused in the series. A little is fine. A little more might be still be fine. For the entire fracking episode, it gives people a headache. Personally, I find it extremely annoying on BSG but less so on other shows that use it less.
The intent is to give it grittier, more "realistic" feel by making you think it's being filmed by an amateur camerman or someone who's dodging mortar fire or something. However, amateur camera operators eventually stop being amateurs, and mortar rounds eventually stop falling. BSG should cut back on this gimmick drastically, but not eliminate it.
OK, folks...at what point does the Windows bashing just become so silly that it's wrong. Oh, wait...we reached that point long ago.
The headline is just wrong. The Vista firewall is no more "crippled" than iptables is "crippled" in Fedora. Microsoft is making the default behavior identical to the XP firewall, but getting bidirectional port filtering/blocking is merely a matter of turning it on. The whole "requiring various degrees of technical expertise" is a ridiculous red herring coming from a website where Linux users constantly preach their technical superiority to the common lowly user. Pardon me, would you like some elitism with that pedantic whine?
For the vast majority of users, bidirectional firewalling is overkill. For those who want it, it can be turned on. This isn't a story, it's propaganda masquerading as news. I swear, Microsoft tries to improve things (adding the ability to do outbound blocking), and all/. can do is whine that it isn't turned on by default. Last time I checked, lots of Linux distros come setup this way as well, yet I don't see anyone moaning about that.
Microsoft is the competitor, not the enemy. Quit making this whole crusade a personal affair and this silly anti-MS bias will disappear.
Your last sentence makes my point. If you own one share of Microsoft, you own it - a share. You own a share that represents some fraction of the value of the company. But what do you own? A tire on one of the company cars? A few cases of paper? A copy of Windows XP? Even if you owned a controlling interest, what do you own? You own an abstraction of the value of the company. Can you take your share of Microsoft stock to Redmond and ask for your 10e-9th fraction of the assets of the company? Nope. But you can sell that abstraction to somebody else.
This argument is specious. Taking your logic, I can own 100% of the shares of a company yet -- according to you -- I still "own" nothing. Or are you going to argue that your position only applies to those who have fractional ownership?
As for your idea that you can't go to Microsoft and demand your portion of the company, you're quite right. But you're forgetting what stock really is. It is not a deed of ownership of a tangible item, it is ownership of value. The value fluctuates with the worth of the company (and other variables, of course), but my portion of that ownership does not change. The fact that you own an intangible does nothing to alter the fact that you still own it, which was my original -- and still uncontested -- argument.
Now, if you wish to redefine ownership as something that can only apply to tangible things, be my guest. The rest of the world won't join you in your quest to reshape the English language, but you go right ahead and get your jollies however you see fit.
Yeah, and the gold fringe around the flag means that it's an admiralty court, so it has no jurisdiction over you.
This makes no sense. What is your point?
Every expense is part of the profit/loss statement. No surprise there. But this isn't a commodity business, so prices don't move in direct relation to those expenses. If all that it took to deal with an increase in expenses was a corresponding increase in prices, then no company would ever post a loss. The hitch in that plan is that most pricing is driven by the marketplace as opposed to being simply a "cost plus" proposition.
All cost increases eventually trickle down to the consumer, either in the form of higher prices or reduced profit margins. The former requires the consumer to foot the bill. The latter puts the company at a disadvantage competitively, thus hurting stockholders and potentially putting the firm out of business. quod erat demonstrandum.
The whole wealth and class warfare business is just a red herring.
The OP seemed just a tad too smug that Symantec was being fined so egregiously, especially the part about Symantec trying to hide wealth overseas. Sounded an awful lot like "those fat cats got what they deserved" without anyone considering the impact to the average consumer or shareholder. That, in turn, sounds almost identical to the average idiot's class warfare rhetoric.
Incidentally,/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, has something like $40 billion in cash. That's wealth. My employer has about $2 billion on hand. That's wealth, too. Sure, you could make an argument that it's wealth that belongs to the shareholders, but the whole company belongs to them - from the physical plant to the paper clips. But saying that it's the shareholder's money is like saying that public lands belong to the people - which acre in Nevada is yours?
No, it's not. I have a certificate (quite a few of them, actually) that says how many shares of the company I own. I get to vote on various things depending upon the company. I can redeem that stock any time I choose for its fair market value. Were I rich enough, I could purchase a controlling interest in said company and direct it myself. None of this applies to your "public land" analogy, making it more than a little flawed. Actually, it's a lot flawed. No, then again, it's totally flawed.
But to address your $40 billion in MS cash comment, Microsoft, as a company, can do nothing with that money. Can a company walk down to the store and even buy a gallon of milk? No, it cannot. A company cannot spend any money because it is not a sentient entity. It has no wants, needs, or desires. It has no volition. It is an organizational construct, nothing more. People spend money, which is why that $40 billion in cash actually belongs to Microsoft's stockholders. Again, you've proven my argument that companies do not and cannot hold wealth. Thanks! It's not like I needed help, but if you're willing to make my arguments for me, so much the better.
The hole in part of your proposition is that, under normal conditions, "ownership" (in the form of stock) in a corporation is not a literal thing.
Oh really? Methinks thou art...well...wrong. If I only own one share of Microsoft, I still own it. That is a literal thing in every sense of the word. I'd love to see you try and prove otherwise.
Perhaps you missed the part of my post where I said that this applied to "consumers", which was kind of a hint that it would apply to people who purchased Symantec products.
Not unless Symantec has a monopoly on anti-malware. Otherwise, the market determines what they can charge.
True, but only to a certain extent. Symantec is a very large company with a diverse array of products. It can easily spread this cost to other products that it has little competition in, or markets that it dominates. If nothing else, the worth of the company is devalued by $1 billion and the stockholders pay. In the end, costs borne by a company are always trickled down. They have to be, because the company holds no wealth to itself.
They pay taxes because we all pay taxes. Nothing could be fairer.
Another misconception. Corporations do not pay taxes. Oh, they write big checks to the government around tax season every year, but how can a company -- not a person, but a company -- pay taxes? It owns nothing. It can't spend money. A company cannot buy itself a house, car, or anything else. I company is, in the tax sense, a non-entity.
Instead, we pay those taxes in the form of higher costs of goods and services. Or, if we're employees of that company, we pay it in the form of lower salaries and benefits than what we'd have if corporations weren't taxed as they are. Or, if we're shareholders, we pay for it in the form of lower share value, lower dividends, or both. But make no mistake about it: companies do not pay taxes in the real sense of the word. We do.
You're right that there are many, many unanswered questions. Your condition of "beyond a shadow of a doubt" before action, however, is somewhat in opposition to your first point-- if we can never answer all the questions because there are so many variables, we can never meet your criteria to act.
Which is why we need to better understand the entire system before taking any drastic action. Or we need to think of less drastic action, at which time the burden of evidence can be lowered. I'm not talking about knowing how the atmosphere works all the way down to the quantum mechanical level, but we need far more understanding than we have now before we take some of the steps that are now being proposed (i.e. massive cutbacks in emissions, but only for certain countries).
What we do have now is historical correlations between natural CO2 and warming, recent correlations (adjusted for natural emissions) between human CO2 and warming, and a reasonable (but obviously incomplete) set of of variables controlled for in the model.
But you're missing my point here. You have a graph that shows CO2 going up. You have a graph that shows temps going up. You are drawing a correlation from just those two factors. Are they related? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. But our understanding of our own atmosphere is so ridiculously limited that we could -- and probably are -- leaving out some fairly significant factors. I want to know what those factors are and how they may or may not be contributing to things before I see the price of gas doubled, or the price of a car increase by 30%, or the price of delivered goods increased by 30%, or my power bill go up 30%. In short, if you want me to make a sacrifice in my way of life, you need to convince me that it's necessary for me to do so. Thus far, the best evidence I've seen is "well, everybody knows it's because of CO2!" Yeah, and everybody "knows" the moon is made out of green cheese. Proof, proof, proof!
While it would be entirely possible for the first correlation to indicate that natural CO2 emissions occur because of warming, and not vice versa-- this becomes highly unlikely in the case of man-made emissions. We do not emit carbon because it's warmer-- we emit it because we drive to work and use energy. Since our own increases in carbon produce an identical warming correlation with the natural carbon, it seems likely that carbon does in fact cause warming.
This, of course, assumes we're not missing some other factor...which is quite likely given the primitive nature of our understanding of these things. I'd really hate to wreck the world's economy when either (a) we didn't need to take such drastic steps or (b) we'd wreck the economies of dozens of nations but not address the real cause of "climate change."
Again, I'm going to repeat my cancer analogy: should I start chemotherapy because I have sudden, unexplained weight loss? Should I do it first, before getting a thorough checkup to make sure there isn't some other reason? After all, the side effects of chemo are not pretty, and if I have any number of other ailments that cause sudden weight loss, I might actually make that condition worse.
To answer the question, no, I shouldn't do this. I should instead seek the advice of a number of professionals in the medical field, making sure none of them have an axe to grind or kickback to collect that might warp their diagnosis in a particular direction. Once reasonable consensus is acheived with verifiable evidence, then I should embark upon whatever course of action is needed to rectify the problem. But not until. That's not only foolish, it's potentially dangerous.
We are well past the point of "reasonable doubt,"
That is your opinion, and a number of noted climatologists with much more knowledge and experience than you find total disagreement with your statement.
All we know for sure is that carbon warms things, nature emits carbon, and
Sure, they will settle, but they WILL pay in this post-Enron world.
No, they won't. You're under the misapprehension that companies have wealth. They do not. Only people hold wealth and property (this includes shareholders, by the way). Therefore, if the IRS hits Symantec with a $1 billion charge, you and I (as consumers and/or shareholders) will foot the bill. Never let the class-warefare rhetoric let you forget that every time a company pays a fine or pays taxes, you as the consumer of that company's goods are actually paying that fine.
There are many different controls for temperature, but what no decent physicist or chemist doubts is that CO2 is definitely one of them.
And anyone who claimed CO2 didn't have anything to do with it would be a fool, that is true. However, your statement leaves out the single most important word: "signficant." Sure, CO2 can increase warming. It's a greenhouse gas. That's what it does. But -- and here's the clincher -- is it the most significant contributor to warming? If it is, we should do something about it. If it isn't, then we need to be worry about whatever else the cause may be. But, as of now, nobody can say with any certainty whether it is the most significant contributor or not. Ergo, it's silly to be making drastic changes globally to attack a problem that may not be the real problem.
So you have gone from trying to deny that CO2 has an affect to arguing that if we react as if it does, we will cause problems?
No, no, no. Do not put words in my mouth. I have never said CO2 has no effect. I am saying that no one has proven it is the largest contributor outside of other possible variables. Until that happens, it's pointless to concentrated on the assumed boogeyman when we may, in fact, be totally ignoring a far more dangerous problem.
Sorry to be so blunt - I try not to be rude, but no-one with any sense could not see the plain evidence of increased arctic and antarctic melting, and increased sea levels. This is now historical fact, not subject to debate.
Very true. And I will not -- and have not -- argued that the planet isn't getting warmer. Any fool with a thermometer and a logbook can show that to be true. What I'm disagreeing with is the root cause of the warming. You seem to think it's CO2. I'm asking you to prove it. You cannot. You can assume. You can hypothesize. You can guess. You can model. You can predict. But you cannot prove. You do not have enough data on the entire system to prove root causes. Nobody does. And unless we study this problem a whole lot more before taking drastic action, nobody will.
Sorry, but we do have considerable quantative and qualitative evidence that human activity is having a dramatic effect on the CO2 concentration.
[sigh] You keep missing the point, either due to ignorance or blindness. I'm not arguing about CO2 levels, I'm arguing about effects of those levels. How much extra warming of the atmosphere is due to the increased level of CO2? You don't know that. The best climatologists in the world cannot agree on it. All the computer models have margins of error so large that the CO2 either has already doomed us or it's not a threat no matter what we do. You seem to think the levels of CO2 are prima facie evidence of the cause of the warming. That's a very convenient assumption given the fact that you do not understand what inputs to our climate produce a given output.
Please explain how else you would cut back on CO2 output without putting some restrictions on use of fossil fuels?
There is no other method. However, it's not been proven clearly that doing so would affect global warming in any way at all. It might. It might not. It all depends on whether CO2 is the root cause, which has not been proven.
Which point?
The point that you have no hard data, no "smoking gun" linking CO2 to warming, other than the fact that (a) it's warmer now than it was in the past and (b) there's more CO2 here now than in the past. You're leaving out, oh, say about about billion other variables, some of which could be contributing far more to global warming than you're considering. But you've stopped considering because you've already come to a conclusion...despite your lack of a full understanding of the situation.
The problem is that I am not very happy with the idea of hundreds of millions of people suffering because of drought, or major wars over water and land resources, as climate c
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And plenty of people are stupid and shortsighted. What's your point?
...and bunches of others that I haven't bothered to list.
/. myrmidon.
My point is that you're being insular, arrogant, stupid, and shortsighted yourself. Everyone is not like you. DRM is not necessarily a bad thing all the time. True, it's far worse than totally unfettered access to digital content, but the media companies are not going to release content in an uncontrolled fashion. Of course, we have the wonderful pirate culture to blame for that, since they've shown themselves to be oh so responsible when it comes to observing the rights of intellectual property holders. But I digress. The point here is that DRM which allows at least limited copying is far, far better than things like DeCSS which allow no legal copying whatsoever. You can argue otherwise 'til you're blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. If anything, you're just pouting because you can't violate copyrights anymore.
Perhaps you missed the part about "modern 3-D accelerated games" in my requirements. Many in your list have a bit of age on them. Try harder next time.
E allows the average user to be subjected to unwanted advertisements.
Perhaps you're unaware of the existence of an integrated pop-up blocker in IE? Or the fact that ad-removal options do exist for IE? Besides, this is no more a "broken" feature than Firefox's lack of support for ActiveX Controls. You're grasping at straws here.
IE allows spyware and adware to take over the average user's computer.
And Firefox on Linux is immune to this...how? A number of exploits have surfaced for FF on Linux. Several of them allowed arbitrary code execution. Are you going to be stupid enough to suggest that all the bugs in FF are gone now? That there will never be another exploit? Or, going further, that FF is somehow immune to social engineering practices that trick users into downloading malicious content? You're making a huge fool of yourself here and not even remotely presenting a challenge to me in this argument.
IE allows the average user's computer to get viruses. IE puts the average user at extreme risk of identity theft.
Blah blah blah. You keep spouting the same old tired lines. I will remind you that FF, Opera, Safari, and every other browser known to man either currently has or recently had numerous exploits available that would allow such as this. If you want to be stupid enough to claim that this will never happen again, go ahead. It will simply reinforce the idea that you're so blinded by anti-MS hatred that you're unable to make a rational decision in this matter. And even if you could somehow magically make FF/Opera/Linux/OSX/whatever immune to code exploits, all of these are still vulnerable to socially engineering an ususpecting, ignorant user into doing all manner of nefarious things to their own machine. Even non-root users can do a lot of damage, especially to themselves (deletion of user home directory would hurt, now, wouldn't it? And that can't be stopped by simply restricting root access because the user has rw privs to his/her home dir). Gosh, you didn't think about that, did you? Now that I mention it, you didn't think much at all about this whole concept, did you? You just reacted emotionally, like a good
ot to mention that by now the number of websites that don't work in Firefox are negligable.
Oh really? You don't surf much, do you? I use FF every day (I'm using it right now). I come across at least one or two every day that don't render properly in FF but look fine in IE. Sure, FF is trying to do things the "web standard" way and IE is doing things the "Microsoft" way, but my original point stands unmolested: none of this matters to the end user. If it renders properly in IE, it doesn't matter if the site had to be coded in object-oriented FORTRAN. The user doesn
...that these practices are not criminal according to US law. Seems to me this is corporate greed at ist best.
It's called "freedom," a word you aren't apparently familiar with. In this country, people are free to not buy Windows Vista, Halo PC, or whatever if they don't want to, thus voting with their dollars. Microsoft can only be as greedy as the market will allow it. If the market decides Microsoft's products are no longer worth the money Microsoft is demanding, Microsoft will lose customers. It's that simple. Such a pity that you think goverment is somehow required to solve all your piddling little problems.
This negates all the improvements you just listed, and more.
That is your opinion only. There are plenty of people out there who find nothing wrong with the DRM at all because (gasp!) it allows them to do whatever they want to do with it (i.e. make backups, etc.) Just because it prevents you from ripping the latest movie and giving it to all your friends free of charge doesn't mean some people don't find it the least be intrusive...or even less intrusive than the current DeCSS since it offers no legal way to copy it at all.
Not to mention that they shouldn't be bothering with DirectX at all, but instead should be implementing a standard like OpenGL, etc.,
OpenGL? Oh, you mean that graphics standard run by the woefully-lethargic standards body that took years to move from one point release to the next? The standard that came to have almost as many proprietary extensions as it did standard ones? OpenGL was a great thing, and it could've remained a great thing. The problem is, it didn't keep pace with graphics card development and gamer interests, largely due to its glacial roots in professional OpenGL cards. I should know because I have had many such cards over the years. The point here is that Microsoft put DirectX in place and pushed it farther and faster than OpenGL could. The initial DirectX was a disaster and it really didn't come into its own until about DirectX7. Today, DirectX9 is the "standard" whether you like it or not. If you doubt that, just see how many modern 3D-accelerated games you can run without it. QED.
shouldn't have broken IE in the first place
Other than failing a variety of tests that also make Firefox puke (ie ACID test), please explain how IE is "broken" in a way that matters to the average user. Every website on the planet that entertains customers QA's their site on IE first and all other browsers second -- if at all. You stand a much higher chance of getting a non-functional or poorly formatted web page using Firefox or Opera than with using IE. Oh, sure, IE implements things in a non-standard way, but that doesn't matter to the end user! They just care that their pages look right and don't care one whit what coding gymnastics you went through to get it that way. You can get all high 'n mighty about standard-this and standard-that, but it doesn't matter one hill of beans. If the vast majority of people use something, it's generally a de-facto standard. I know that offends your puritanicalism, but it's true.
and shouldn't need an anti-spyware tool since it's only because of the fundamental flaws in the OS that spyware exists anyway!
So are you implying it's impossible to construct a spyware tool for another OS like, say, OS X or Linux? If so, would you be willing to bet a year's salary on that? Don't be so foolish. Your narrow-mindedness is blinding you to reality. Take a step back and remember that this is software, not a religion. Microsoft is a competitor, not the Nazi party. Quit taking this stuff so personally and your judgement won't be so badly marred by your emotions.
Is one manned moon mission (estimate $100 billion) worth 200 mid-sized science missions (at 500 million each)? Even if my numbers are a bit off, my thinking says no.
Yes, it is worth it, although your opinion will undoubtedly differ from mine. Why is it worth it? Because although we'd get less "hard science" from a manned mission, ultimately the human race must leave its cradle. Unmanned missions offer us the luxury of not having to improve our life support and propulsion systems, because a probe needs no life support and doesn't care if it take five to ten years to get to its destination.
Sooner or later, though, we're going to have to expand beyond this rock we're currently on. The longer we delay manned interplanetary expeditions, the longer it's going to take us to settle something other than Earth. And there's the not-insubstantial benefit of getting all of humanity's eggs out of one basket, so to speak. After all, we're just one planetary catastrophe from extinction just like our dinosaur predecessors. That shouldn't sit well with you if you're the least bit interested in humans eventually colonizing space.
To paraphrase JFK, we should send men (and women) out into space not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Risk -- and its rewards -- moves the species forward. Exploring the universe by unmanned proxy is beneath us if we seek to inherit the stars.
It was a bug. It affected Word, and I experienced it first hand at work.
Having had over 2,000 desktops under my group, we never had any such issue. You can't find a KB article on it, so that would tend to indicate that it was something specific to you and not generally widespread. Thus, you have no business blaming it on Microsoft, although you do it anyway. I'm sure it just suits your purpose do to so. You probably blame Bush for high gas prices as well, don't you?
Well, what I was thinking was a team contracted just for that purpose.
Perhaps you missed the part where I stated "You just paid developers to rewrite something that already worked just fine. Great use of company resources! What a way to save money!"
OK, OS cost is the same, what about office Pro, and Acrobat Full version for a large amount of users.
Office Pro costs, when purchased in bulk with corporate licensing discounts, are not any more expensive than buying annual support options for something like StarOffice 8. Acrobat Full edition is rarely needed by anyone when the PDF printer available in Acrobat Elements is available for about $20 per desktop license. Again, though, bulk licensing purchases of something like Acrobat are far cheaper than you are apparently aware of.
Who mentioned bugs? You were refering to the robustness?
Perhaps you're unaware that bugs cause crashes, which is also referred to as "downtime," the lack of which is a measure of robustness. Were you asleep the day they taught computers in computer school?
Windows users are assumed to have administrator rights by many software companies it seems. Not true for Linux. Linux has better facilities for giving partial root access to users.
What developers assume is in no way Microsoft's fault. Using your logic, if I wrote an app that needlessly required root access in order to function under Linux, it's the fault of Linux, not me.
As for Linux have "better facilities" for non-root access, again you're wrong. It's quite easy to assign a users a locked-down profile on a box to the point where they're unable to alter any vital systems settings and unable to access protected areas of the machine...just like Linux. The point that not everyone does so does not invalidate the fact that the capability does exist. You are apparently ignorant of this fact...among many others, I'd say.
No, I blame the registry and MS Office over integration into the operating system.
So a third party developer makes their product integrate improperly with a published, codified, well-known spec like the Windows Registry, and it's somehow Microsoft's fault? While I'll admit I'm no big fan of the registry, your logic is absolutely absurd to the point of silliness. Using your argument, I could defame Linux immediately by writing a bunch of applications that flout established app integration rules like shared libraries and such. Hey, it's not my fault I wrote an app that causes Linux to kernel panic, it's the fault of Linux! Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world.
Ha ha ha ha, sorry, had to share a laugh with all the other Linux people about that reboot as often Windows line. Let's see, upgrade the browser, no restart, upgrade the office client, no restart, change UI language, all apps subsequently opened are in that language, no restart.
Your ignorance is showing once again. Let's see: we use Firefox as our browser, so upgrading it doesn't require a restart. We can upgrade Office without a restart (where in the blue hell did you come up with that idiotic nonsense anyway?). Changing the UI language does require a restart, but in all fairness changing it in XWindows requires to you restart X, so there's no advantage there. Look, your bias is clear here to the point that you're making absolute falsifications to support your unsupportable argument. Stop now. You are making a total fool of yourself.
I will be abl
A very valid point. However, a simple look at NASA's budget will quickly show where the dollars are flowing. It's to the Shuttle (that fatally-flawed boondoggle result of some earlier 1970's technological compromises) and the ISS (that fatally-flawed boondoggle result of late 1990's downsizing of Space Station Freedom). Basically, NASA claims we need a Shuttle to service the space station and yet we need a space station to give the Shuttle somewhere to go. It's a circular justification that benefits almost no one except the various contractors involved in both projects.
Take the entire Shuttle and ISS budget and redirect it to a moon shot, moon base, and manned mission to Mars. Things would happen a lot faster and, quite likely, with greater efficiency.
While you're correct that greater-than-two-socket mobos require 8xx Opterons instead of 2xx ones, you're not quite correct with regards to pricing. The price differential for an Opteron 8xx versus a Xeon MP is rather substantial. For example, an Opteron 880 2.4GHz dual core chip is listed on pricewatch for $1,349. A Xeon MP 3.66GHz w/ 1MB of L2 goes for $1,799.00 -- and that's for a single-core part. Doing some quick math, we find that a four-socket setup of 880 Opterons (eight cores total) would cost you $5,396. You could get four Xeon MP's for $7,196, but that would yield you only four cores and much, much lower performance. You could go with an eight-way Xeon MP setup if you can find one, but that would cost $14,392, not to mention the amazing cost and scarcity of eight-way mobos. That's a $9,000 price premium for Intel.
Switching to dual-core Xeon MP's helps a bit, but not a lot. A dual-core 3GHz Xeon MP (2x 2MB L2 cache) sets you back $3,501 per chip. Getting four of them brings the tab to $14,004. So you save about $400 over getting eight single-core Xeon MP's, and you'd probably save about $1,000-$2,000 on the motherboard. You're still more than double the cost of the Opteron 8xx setup, and no matter how you slice it, a 3GHz Xeon core on a 667MHz system bus has difficulty competing with a 2.4GHz Opteron core on a 1GHz HyperTransport bus.
The whole "back to the Moon" thing is a load of garbage.
Your short-sightedness is amazing here. "There's nothing more to learn on the Moon"? Where do you get that from? We've sent precisely six manned missions to the moon in all of human history. Only twelve humans have actually walked on it. Almost none of them had a strong scientific background (although many learned it in order to be more effective). Yet we know everything there is to know about the moon according to you. Your hubris is absolutely mind-boggling.
Experts have long admitted that launching a mission to Mars from the Moon is far more difficult than doing it from here.
Umm...exactly who is proposing we launch a Mars mission from the Moon? Bush sure isn't, and neither is any other sane person. To build up a launch infrastructure on the Moon would be a multi-decade endeavor and would likely eclipse a Mars mission for sheer complexity and cost.
No, the Moon is a beta test site, if you will. No human has left low Earth orbit for almost four decades! All the engineers who made Apollo work are either dead or retired. Our heavy lift capacity is completely moribund. With but few exceptions, we're going to have to learn a bunch of things all over again. Which is a better place to learn these things, a spot that's only a couple of days away from the Earth via free-return trajectory, or a spot that's months away with no such option? It doesn't take much more intelligence than a turnip to understand the former is far more advantageous than the latter. It's safer, it'll cost less, and we'll get quicker "knowledge returns".
Once we rediscover how to get to the Moon, setting up a moonbase will essentially be a "dry run" for setting up a Mars habitat. True, the lunar surface and Martian surface don't have a lot in common, but they're both immensely rugged and challenging environments to construct even a sand castle. Learning how to build a moonbase will teach us in no small part how to build a Mars base. Or would you rather we get to Mars first then try to figure all this out then, when astronauts are beyond any easy help from Earth?
NASA has become the "Santa Claus" of the U.S. Government. Keep the children excited and maybe they'll think there really is a future, after all.
While I'll freely admit NASA is merely a vast sinkhole for funds and functioning solely as a reason to have a space station right now, the return to the Moon does not fit that category. There is a future if ostriches like yourself would only see it. Instead, your cynicism and politcal bias appears to be clouding what might otherwise be a capability for sound judgement on your part.
Tech Guy: Well, that's true. We are trying to avoid future fiascoes like when legal upgraded to 2003 as soon as it came out, remember that? Once they edited a document all the office 2000 users, the other 95% of the firm, couldn't open them.
Since Microsoft didn't alter file formats between Office 2000 and Office 2003, this is a complete and total lie. Either that or you're so woefully out of date that you don't realize it. There was a problem from Office 97 to Office 2000, but if you have to go back nearly a decade to find a problem with upgrades, you're really having to reach.
We also have had a development team that incorporated all the macros you use into the office suite itself! Because it's open source they could tailor them to the software better. The old macros took too long right? On the new suit the functions take less than half the time!
Gee, it must be nice to have a development team sitting around with nothing to do. Real businesses have these people tasked with this thing called "work" which is required to keep the company going, and they don't have time to be mucking around adding features to a new program that's suppose to replace the old program that already had those features! And as for your "we fixed the macros to make them better," that's kind of silly because it presupposes the old macros were somehow wrong. What if they weren't? You just paid developers to rewrite something that already worked just fine. Great use of company resources! What a way to save money!
Tech Guy: True, but it is cheaper. The OS, office suite, and Acrobat we won't be paying for make a big difference. The initial upgrade will be expensive, productivity will be lost to start, but the stability of the platform and the over all lack of downtime will save us tones long run. The projected cost to upgrade to Windows Vista are off the scale! We would have to replace 80% or our hardware! And we won't really have to worry about viruses!
Cheaper? How? RHEL costs roughly the same as Windows, and ongoing support contract costs are roughly the same. The stability of the platform and lack of downtime will save in the long run? Again, you pre-suppose that people are having problems with the platform to begin with. Well run shops don't have workstations that crash all the time because they buy quaility machines preloaded with all the right drivers and they don't tinker with them. Driver problems cause 99% of all the crashes in Windows, but drivers can take down Linux just as easily. And since most companies spend significantly less time and effort developing and troubleshooting their Linux drivers vs. their Windows drivers, you stand a greater likelihood of getting something half-baked.
As for Vista upgrade costs, customers on Software Assurance pay nothing for the upgrade. Those without it will pay and arm and a leg, that's for sure, but very few companies buy their software separately any more. They buy the OS during hardware refreshes. This means that in one fell swoop it destroys your argument completely, because the new OS will be bundled with the cost of the machine (and it's a negligible cost compared to the $2,500 purchase cost) and the new hardware will automatically be capable of running the new OS. Most companies are on a 3-5 year refresh cycle already, so this is not anywhere near the issue you're trying to make it out to be. Clearly you have no idea how corporate IT functions.
You can never be immune to viruses. As more firms switch to Linux there will undoubtedly be more viruses, but the basic nature of Linux make it's more robust.
Bullshit. Analysis of bug trends has shown that bugs happen in Linux at roughly the same rates as Windows. Windows bugs get more press because (gasp!) there are more Windows PC's out there.
Remember how I had to make you administrator of your machine so you could run that accounting package? About 30% of the machines in our branch have some software that requ
Based on my experience (long time Linux user, but I am now quite comfortable using Windows too), I believe that Windows folks should switch to Linux only if they have strong reasons for doing so. These could be not wanting to pay for software, a better programming environment, security, etc. Unless there is some personal motivation, people will not want to put in the effort to learn to use a new operating system.
/., I know, but it's the truth, unalloyed and unvarnished with rose colored thoughts.
Look, I'm the I.T. Director for a large company. I have a lot of computers to manage. Every year I have to put together budget for hardware, software, training, and maintenance. Every year, a sizable portion of that budget goes to Microsoft. I don't like it one little bit, and if someone told me I could somehow get the exact same software functionality for free in another package, I'd carve out that Microsoft Licensing line item in a microsecond.
But reality intrudes. My company uses a number of pieces of software, some off the shelf, some custom. None of them are available for or customized for Linux. Therefore, despite all protestations and gesticulations by the Linux mavens, it simply isn't a viable option for me or the hordes of users I'm trying to serve. I don't care what anyone says, if the OS cannot run the applications I require it to run, it is not better, it is useless! Heresy here on
For those who can easily move their apps over to Linux -- or if OTS packages are available for your chosen app -- you have my envy. But no one had better tell me Linux is better than what I have now. It isn't. It can't be, because it cannot do what I need it to do. It's not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of the software developers who do not yet support it, but the end result is still the same. Wishful thinking cannot and will not change that.
"Nannying" usually refers to things where the government tries to regulate things that will harm only yourself. Like forcing you to use the seatbelt in your car. In these cases, I agree that government should stay out of peoples' lives. I would even go further and make it legal to use most drugs, for instance.
Agreed on all points.
But the problem with dumping toxic waste into the landscape is that it hurts others, and that is not something we should allow. Even the most libertarian society needs some rules against ruthless behaviour that affects your fellow citizen.
Agreed as well, as that is a proper function of government. Here is my definition of how laws ought to be structured: you should be free to perform any action you can possibly want so long as that action does not deprive someone else of their life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. In your toxic dump scenario, if I owned a stretch of land and wanted to allow someone to dump toxic stuff on it and pay me for the privilege, that's my right. However, my rights stop at the borders of my land -- and that includes the air above and groundwater below. It should be legal for me to do whatever I want with that land insofar as I take the appropriate steps to make sure it never seeps beyond my land. If it does, the surrounding landowners now have cause to hold me completely and totally responsible for any and all costs required to rectify the situation. If it is technologically impossible for me to prevent such seepage, then I should be prevented from using the area as a toxic dump. There you go, yin and yang, perfect and equal. And government need be only invovled in the most peripheral fashion.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, you'd be surprised by the amount of trouble "normal" people are willing to go through just to avoid learning new things. Windows-users especially.
And this is where you ran off the rails with your point. "Avoid learning new things?" Here, take a very short walk with me down to a "normal" user:
Tech Guy: Here, Mr. User, we're going to give you a new operating system and a completely new set of applications with which to perform your duties.
Mr. User: OK! Tell me, what does it do that's new or useful?
Tech Guy: Well, it won't crash like Windows!
Mr. User: Well, but I've been using Windows XP now for about the last three years, and it doesn't crash much if at all. What else does this new OS do?
Tech Guy: Well, it has all new applications!
Mr. User: You mean it doesn't have Office 2003?
Tech Guy: Uh, well, no, it doesn't. It has this other application suite that's just as good! Maybe even better!
Mr. User: But it looks very different to me! The user interface will require me to get used to it, which will reduce my productivity for a little while. My existing documents might look different in this new suite. Further, all the advanced features such as macros probably don't carry over to this new app. That's a real bummer because I depend on those features to do my job. Does this suite do anything any better than Office 2003 that would allow me to offset this loss of productivity? In other words, is it giving me anything new to offset the costs of moving to it?
Tech Guy: Well, uh...it's free!
Mr. User: Hey, bud, I work in accounting. We saw the invoices for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the office suite. You're paying for support for this stuff. It's not free.
Tech Guy: It's immune to viruses!
Mr. User: You said the same thing about the Mac's down in the art department, yet they're running anti-virus software, aren't they? And your buddy on the helpdesk told me that last week Apple patched 43 separate flaws in their OS, many of which allowed complete takeover of the Mac much like a Windows virus. Do you honestly think your new OS/app combo is going to be immune to all viruses over time? Besides, you bought anti-virus software for all the Windows PC's several years ago with annual subscriptions to virus patterns. We haven't been hit by a virus in a long, long time because of that. So, explain to me again what the advantages are here?
Tech Guy: But...but...listen here, you obstinate fool! It's better, I say! And don't you dare argue with me because I know more than you! I have the superior intellect here, and you're just a lowly, unintelligent (sneers) user.
Mr. User: So let me see if I understand you here. You want to give me something different, different enough that I'm going to have change my work habits in order to accomodate it. It's designed to fix crashing problems that I don't have. It's free but it costs money to support. And even once I get used to it all and it's all paid for, it won't do anything that I can't already do with the stuff we already have, that's already paid for, and that everyone is already trained on and familiar with.
Tech Guy: But it's better! It's open! I understand these arcane things in ways you cannot hope to comprehend!
Mr. User: Two words for you, buddy: de-caff. You should try it sometime.
The situation's similar in Europe but over here we don't all have the knee-jerk "reaction against all legislation as a point of principle".
You exaggerate to make your point. I'm a Libertarian. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction against all legislation. However, government should be restricted to performing the absolute minimum number of roles as is possible without compromising personal freedoms and responsibilites. In short -- and with but a few exceptions -- government should never be allowed to perform a duty that any non-governmental entity could not perform adequately on its own. National defense comes to mind, as does law enforcement. But mandating battery recycling standards? Last time I checked our Constitution, that clause wasn't in there. Nor should it be inferred that the "Necessary and Proper" clause allows government such sweeping, ill-defined powers. You guys on the other side of the pond don't have our Constitution (more's the pity), so there's no easy correlation. My point, however, stands regardless of this, as I feel the EU Constitution is far too statist.
That's not to say we agree with everything imposed on us but it is recognised that sometimes the actions of the economically powerful need to be constrained by the [representatives of] the people.
This sounds disturbingly close to your average class-warfare rhetoric. "Constrain" the power of the "economically powerful"? Pray tell, how does someone become "economically powerful"? Oh, that's right, people choose to purchase their goods and services. Here's a fundamental fact you fail to address: power is not taken, power is given . Consumers choose to give power by using the power of their wallets. That power can be removed by consumer consensus at any time. Even Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, could be reduced to mere mortal status should the computing industry consumers decide en masse to shift to a different solution such as Linux/OpenOffice. The power of the consumer prevents Bill Gates from charging $10,000 a copy for Windows. Likewise, the ubiquity of Windows prevents consumers from easily moving to another platform. The two powers keep each other in check to varying degrees, but they do prevent massive abuses. Government is not required here.
Market forces are good up to a point but they do have intrinsic limitations:
Market forces only have intrinsic limitations if you restrict the period of time you're examining. Over a long enough time, however, market forces always win. Soviet-style communism flouted free-market principles for the better part of about eight decades, but eventually the system could not support its contradictions and collapsed. In fact, it can be argued that all artificial (i.e. government mandated) attempts to mess with the free market are doomed to failure, as the market will always self-correct even with outside interference. Smaller interferences take longer to fail that large ones. The problem with your ideas is not the free market, it is a lack of patience to let the natural ebb and flow of supply and demand to do its job.
Because the eco-nazi, nanny-statists will have none of it. You are just a drone that needs to be dictated to.
My point exactly. Humans who cast away their personal responsibilities so cavalierly are not deserving of the title "sentient" if you ask me. I would classify them on the same level as slaves except slaves do not give up their freedoms voluntarily. Nanny-statists do.
The problem is the next guy who doesn't give a shit.
Then we, as the human race, get what we deserve by not giving a shit. It is not the job of government to "nanny" us. I realize that's a popular way to use government today, but it is a very bad role for government to be given power to exercise over.
Side observation: isn't it funny how those who are so quick to endorse the concept of majority rule (i.e. a true democracy) are so quick to cast it away "for the common good"? After all, if the vast majority of people want something, most liberals think they ought to get it. Why should environmentally-damaging products be any different? Food for thought.
If it passes, it will be interesting to see how this affects such devices as MP3 players that generally do not have removeable rechargeable batteries.
If you define interesting as "it will increase the overall price with respect to current units, and the increased amount of government regulation and oversight which will require additional tax funds," then yes, I agree with you, it's quite interesting.
Look, I'm as keen to recycle as the next guy, but since when did government become the solution to all problems? Here's a radical, way-far-out-there idea: if you want the battery industry to change, refuse to purchase devices that are non-recyclable! Nothing stirs an industry quite so quickly -- or so efficiently -- as a consumer revolt. We get greener products, the industry adapts to deliver what we want, and there's no intrusive government leaning over somebody's shoulder telling them what to do. What an elegant solution! It's a pity the knee-jerk reaction these days -- regardless of what continent or island group you're on -- is to scream "Here's a problem! We must demand that government do more to fix it!"
I think his point was that the Shakey Camera Gimmick(tm) has been used and overused in the series. A little is fine. A little more might be still be fine. For the entire fracking episode, it gives people a headache. Personally, I find it extremely annoying on BSG but less so on other shows that use it less.
The intent is to give it grittier, more "realistic" feel by making you think it's being filmed by an amateur camerman or someone who's dodging mortar fire or something. However, amateur camera operators eventually stop being amateurs, and mortar rounds eventually stop falling. BSG should cut back on this gimmick drastically, but not eliminate it.
OK, folks...at what point does the Windows bashing just become so silly that it's wrong. Oh, wait...we reached that point long ago.
/. can do is whine that it isn't turned on by default. Last time I checked, lots of Linux distros come setup this way as well, yet I don't see anyone moaning about that.
The headline is just wrong. The Vista firewall is no more "crippled" than iptables is "crippled" in Fedora. Microsoft is making the default behavior identical to the XP firewall, but getting bidirectional port filtering/blocking is merely a matter of turning it on. The whole "requiring various degrees of technical expertise" is a ridiculous red herring coming from a website where Linux users constantly preach their technical superiority to the common lowly user. Pardon me, would you like some elitism with that pedantic whine?
For the vast majority of users, bidirectional firewalling is overkill. For those who want it, it can be turned on. This isn't a story, it's propaganda masquerading as news. I swear, Microsoft tries to improve things (adding the ability to do outbound blocking), and all
Microsoft is the competitor, not the enemy. Quit making this whole crusade a personal affair and this silly anti-MS bias will disappear.
Your last sentence makes my point. If you own one share of Microsoft, you own it - a share. You own a share that represents some fraction of the value of the company. But what do you own? A tire on one of the company cars? A few cases of paper? A copy of Windows XP? Even if you owned a controlling interest, what do you own? You own an abstraction of the value of the company. Can you take your share of Microsoft stock to Redmond and ask for your 10e-9th fraction of the assets of the company? Nope. But you can sell that abstraction to somebody else.
This argument is specious. Taking your logic, I can own 100% of the shares of a company yet -- according to you -- I still "own" nothing. Or are you going to argue that your position only applies to those who have fractional ownership?
As for your idea that you can't go to Microsoft and demand your portion of the company, you're quite right. But you're forgetting what stock really is. It is not a deed of ownership of a tangible item, it is ownership of value. The value fluctuates with the worth of the company (and other variables, of course), but my portion of that ownership does not change. The fact that you own an intangible does nothing to alter the fact that you still own it, which was my original -- and still uncontested -- argument.
Now, if you wish to redefine ownership as something that can only apply to tangible things, be my guest. The rest of the world won't join you in your quest to reshape the English language, but you go right ahead and get your jollies however you see fit.
Yeah, and the gold fringe around the flag means that it's an admiralty court, so it has no jurisdiction over you.
/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, has something like $40 billion in cash. That's wealth. My employer has about $2 billion on hand. That's wealth, too. Sure, you could make an argument that it's wealth that belongs to the shareholders, but the whole company belongs to them - from the physical plant to the paper clips. But saying that it's the shareholder's money is like saying that public lands belong to the people - which acre in Nevada is yours?
This makes no sense. What is your point?
Every expense is part of the profit/loss statement. No surprise there. But this isn't a commodity business, so prices don't move in direct relation to those expenses. If all that it took to deal with an increase in expenses was a corresponding increase in prices, then no company would ever post a loss. The hitch in that plan is that most pricing is driven by the marketplace as opposed to being simply a "cost plus" proposition.
All cost increases eventually trickle down to the consumer, either in the form of higher prices or reduced profit margins. The former requires the consumer to foot the bill. The latter puts the company at a disadvantage competitively, thus hurting stockholders and potentially putting the firm out of business. quod erat demonstrandum.
The whole wealth and class warfare business is just a red herring.
The OP seemed just a tad too smug that Symantec was being fined so egregiously, especially the part about Symantec trying to hide wealth overseas. Sounded an awful lot like "those fat cats got what they deserved" without anyone considering the impact to the average consumer or shareholder. That, in turn, sounds almost identical to the average idiot's class warfare rhetoric.
Incidentally,
No, it's not. I have a certificate (quite a few of them, actually) that says how many shares of the company I own. I get to vote on various things depending upon the company. I can redeem that stock any time I choose for its fair market value. Were I rich enough, I could purchase a controlling interest in said company and direct it myself. None of this applies to your "public land" analogy, making it more than a little flawed. Actually, it's a lot flawed. No, then again, it's totally flawed.
But to address your $40 billion in MS cash comment, Microsoft, as a company, can do nothing with that money. Can a company walk down to the store and even buy a gallon of milk? No, it cannot. A company cannot spend any money because it is not a sentient entity. It has no wants, needs, or desires. It has no volition. It is an organizational construct, nothing more. People spend money, which is why that $40 billion in cash actually belongs to Microsoft's stockholders. Again, you've proven my argument that companies do not and cannot hold wealth. Thanks! It's not like I needed help, but if you're willing to make my arguments for me, so much the better.
The hole in part of your proposition is that, under normal conditions, "ownership" (in the form of stock) in a corporation is not a literal thing.
Oh really? Methinks thou art...well...wrong. If I only own one share of Microsoft, I still own it. That is a literal thing in every sense of the word. I'd love to see you try and prove otherwise.
Perhaps you missed the part of my post where I said that this applied to "consumers", which was kind of a hint that it would apply to people who purchased Symantec products.
Not unless Symantec has a monopoly on anti-malware. Otherwise, the market determines what they can charge.
True, but only to a certain extent. Symantec is a very large company with a diverse array of products. It can easily spread this cost to other products that it has little competition in, or markets that it dominates. If nothing else, the worth of the company is devalued by $1 billion and the stockholders pay. In the end, costs borne by a company are always trickled down. They have to be, because the company holds no wealth to itself.
They pay taxes because we all pay taxes. Nothing could be fairer.
Another misconception. Corporations do not pay taxes. Oh, they write big checks to the government around tax season every year, but how can a company -- not a person, but a company -- pay taxes? It owns nothing. It can't spend money. A company cannot buy itself a house, car, or anything else. I company is, in the tax sense, a non-entity.
Instead, we pay those taxes in the form of higher costs of goods and services. Or, if we're employees of that company, we pay it in the form of lower salaries and benefits than what we'd have if corporations weren't taxed as they are. Or, if we're shareholders, we pay for it in the form of lower share value, lower dividends, or both. But make no mistake about it: companies do not pay taxes in the real sense of the word. We do.
You're right that there are many, many unanswered questions. Your condition of "beyond a shadow of a doubt" before action, however, is somewhat in opposition to your first point-- if we can never answer all the questions because there are so many variables, we can never meet your criteria to act.
Which is why we need to better understand the entire system before taking any drastic action. Or we need to think of less drastic action, at which time the burden of evidence can be lowered. I'm not talking about knowing how the atmosphere works all the way down to the quantum mechanical level, but we need far more understanding than we have now before we take some of the steps that are now being proposed (i.e. massive cutbacks in emissions, but only for certain countries).
What we do have now is historical correlations between natural CO2 and warming, recent correlations (adjusted for natural emissions) between human CO2 and warming, and a reasonable (but obviously incomplete) set of of variables controlled for in the model.
But you're missing my point here. You have a graph that shows CO2 going up. You have a graph that shows temps going up. You are drawing a correlation from just those two factors. Are they related? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. But our understanding of our own atmosphere is so ridiculously limited that we could -- and probably are -- leaving out some fairly significant factors. I want to know what those factors are and how they may or may not be contributing to things before I see the price of gas doubled, or the price of a car increase by 30%, or the price of delivered goods increased by 30%, or my power bill go up 30%. In short, if you want me to make a sacrifice in my way of life, you need to convince me that it's necessary for me to do so. Thus far, the best evidence I've seen is "well, everybody knows it's because of CO2!" Yeah, and everybody "knows" the moon is made out of green cheese. Proof, proof, proof!
While it would be entirely possible for the first correlation to indicate that natural CO2 emissions occur because of warming, and not vice versa-- this becomes highly unlikely in the case of man-made emissions. We do not emit carbon because it's warmer-- we emit it because we drive to work and use energy. Since our own increases in carbon produce an identical warming correlation with the natural carbon, it seems likely that carbon does in fact cause warming.
This, of course, assumes we're not missing some other factor...which is quite likely given the primitive nature of our understanding of these things. I'd really hate to wreck the world's economy when either (a) we didn't need to take such drastic steps or (b) we'd wreck the economies of dozens of nations but not address the real cause of "climate change."
Again, I'm going to repeat my cancer analogy: should I start chemotherapy because I have sudden, unexplained weight loss? Should I do it first, before getting a thorough checkup to make sure there isn't some other reason? After all, the side effects of chemo are not pretty, and if I have any number of other ailments that cause sudden weight loss, I might actually make that condition worse.
To answer the question, no, I shouldn't do this. I should instead seek the advice of a number of professionals in the medical field, making sure none of them have an axe to grind or kickback to collect that might warp their diagnosis in a particular direction. Once reasonable consensus is acheived with verifiable evidence, then I should embark upon whatever course of action is needed to rectify the problem. But not until. That's not only foolish, it's potentially dangerous.
We are well past the point of "reasonable doubt,"
That is your opinion, and a number of noted climatologists with much more knowledge and experience than you find total disagreement with your statement.
All we know for sure is that carbon warms things, nature emits carbon, and
Sure, they will settle, but they WILL pay in this post-Enron world.
No, they won't. You're under the misapprehension that companies have wealth. They do not. Only people hold wealth and property (this includes shareholders, by the way). Therefore, if the IRS hits Symantec with a $1 billion charge, you and I (as consumers and/or shareholders) will foot the bill. Never let the class-warefare rhetoric let you forget that every time a company pays a fine or pays taxes, you as the consumer of that company's goods are actually paying that fine.
There are many different controls for temperature, but what no decent physicist or chemist doubts is that CO2 is definitely one of them.
And anyone who claimed CO2 didn't have anything to do with it would be a fool, that is true. However, your statement leaves out the single most important word: "signficant." Sure, CO2 can increase warming. It's a greenhouse gas. That's what it does. But -- and here's the clincher -- is it the most significant contributor to warming? If it is, we should do something about it. If it isn't, then we need to be worry about whatever else the cause may be. But, as of now, nobody can say with any certainty whether it is the most significant contributor or not. Ergo, it's silly to be making drastic changes globally to attack a problem that may not be the real problem.
So you have gone from trying to deny that CO2 has an affect to arguing that if we react as if it does, we will cause problems?
No, no, no. Do not put words in my mouth. I have never said CO2 has no effect. I am saying that no one has proven it is the largest contributor outside of other possible variables. Until that happens, it's pointless to concentrated on the assumed boogeyman when we may, in fact, be totally ignoring a far more dangerous problem.
Sorry to be so blunt - I try not to be rude, but no-one with any sense could not see the plain evidence of increased arctic and antarctic melting, and increased sea levels. This is now historical fact, not subject to debate.
Very true. And I will not -- and have not -- argued that the planet isn't getting warmer. Any fool with a thermometer and a logbook can show that to be true. What I'm disagreeing with is the root cause of the warming. You seem to think it's CO2. I'm asking you to prove it. You cannot. You can assume. You can hypothesize. You can guess. You can model. You can predict. But you cannot prove. You do not have enough data on the entire system to prove root causes. Nobody does. And unless we study this problem a whole lot more before taking drastic action, nobody will.
Sorry, but we do have considerable quantative and qualitative evidence that human activity is having a dramatic effect on the CO2 concentration.
[sigh] You keep missing the point, either due to ignorance or blindness. I'm not arguing about CO2 levels, I'm arguing about effects of those levels. How much extra warming of the atmosphere is due to the increased level of CO2? You don't know that. The best climatologists in the world cannot agree on it. All the computer models have margins of error so large that the CO2 either has already doomed us or it's not a threat no matter what we do. You seem to think the levels of CO2 are prima facie evidence of the cause of the warming. That's a very convenient assumption given the fact that you do not understand what inputs to our climate produce a given output.
Please explain how else you would cut back on CO2 output without putting some restrictions on use of fossil fuels?
There is no other method. However, it's not been proven clearly that doing so would affect global warming in any way at all. It might. It might not. It all depends on whether CO2 is the root cause, which has not been proven.
Which point?
The point that you have no hard data, no "smoking gun" linking CO2 to warming, other than the fact that (a) it's warmer now than it was in the past and (b) there's more CO2 here now than in the past. You're leaving out, oh, say about about billion other variables, some of which could be contributing far more to global warming than you're considering. But you've stopped considering because you've already come to a conclusion...despite your lack of a full understanding of the situation.
The problem is that I am not very happy with the idea of hundreds of millions of people suffering because of drought, or major wars over water and land resources, as climate c