Strangely enough, I agree with this. I'm definitely not against taxes in general and sales tax specifically, but it doesn't make sense to me that a retailer should be required to lift a finger to help a state government from which it gets nothing in return. Those taxes are not going back to Amazon; those taxes are going to pay for things like police and schools in the community in which the *buyer* resides. And yes, the buyer is the one actually paying the tax, but it is ridiculous to expect a company outside of the state to pay any of their own money (in time and effort) to do the work of collecting that tax when they have no say over whether and how that tax is collected.
The states' beef is with the buyers, the actual payers of the tax, who then see the benefits from those taxes. They should be the ones required to collect their own taxes, not the retailers who will never see a dime of the money they spend collecting the tax come back.
This is really no different than what the RIAA is doing. It's the same mentality; if you can't get recourse with the people who you actually should be going after, then just go screw somebody else somewhere up the chain instead.
Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.
Oh, this is bullshit. We put up with it because we're conditioned to put up with all manner of mediocrity, lies, and incompetence in this country. This is only one example of it. Our leaders are another, but WE voted for them.
People always want to put the blame on someone other than themselves. But the people who are responsible for this kind of crap in this country are US. We are responsible because we expect it and we do nothing about it.
If we don't want to put up with shit like this, then we should be electing people based on how they specifically say they're going to respond to these kinds of shenanigans. But we don't. Instead, we vote for people because it looks like they have a nice family in TV commercials, or because they're against teh gays, or because they claim to adhere to some poorly defined set of values (ie. "family values", "conservative principles", etc.).
THAT IS OUR FAULT.
When you see 6-10% of people undecided in the final days of a national election (as was the case in 2008), what does that tell you? It doesn't tell you that we have a bunch of independent thinkers, as those people and the media will claim, it tells you that we have a bunch of people in this country who aren't paying any attention at all. Not only do they not understand the candidates' stances on the issues they care about, they don't even know the broad ideologies of the parties they belong to - they can't even make an assumption based on party affiliation or label. These are the people that often decide our elections.
And when you couple this lack of paying attention with the ridiculously low voting rates we have in this country compared with other democracies, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Ironically, the places you need GPS the most are the places there is no cell phone coverage. As much as I like my Android its my Garmin that goes into the backpack.
In other words, the way you personally use your GPS device must be the way everyone else does, right?
You talk about putting your Garmin into your "backpack" and using it where there is no cell phone service. That's sounding to me like you're taking it hiking out in the back country. Which is fine, but that is not what most people use GPS for these days, nor is it what Google Navigation is intended for. It's intended for use while driving. (Indeed, many GPS devices produced these days will not work when off-road.)
Most places in the United States where there's a road, there's cell phone service. No, maybe not on some rural route in Idaho, but certainly in the most populated areas. And while it may seem counterintuitive, it is actually more helpful to have GPS for car navigation in the most populated areas than it is in the least, the reason being that there are so many more roads, which means so many more turns. To get from my store in Manhattan to my home just outside the city - a distance of approximately 14 miles - requires something like 45 different maneuvers and the use of about that many different roads.
Now, the REAL killer app for Google Navigation, which will be apparent to all eventually if it isn't now, is free cloud-provided live traffic. Most current GPS devices that provide traffic info (and remember, they all force you to pay for it in some way) do it the old fashioned way, usually by subscribing to a service that's taking call-in reports from local police or utilities, or even individual commuters. This info is always old and often wrong. Google Maps' traffic is live, taken from the cloud. Right now, my wife and I have gotten into the habit of having our GPS hooked up and having one of our phones out with Google Maps loaded up to check traffic on our route. (Remember, this is New York.) And it's always right, but there's currently no easy way for us to do anything about it when our GPS device guides us into a "red" traffic area. (We can press the "detour" button, but that doesn't really guide us around traffic, just a pre-set distance.)
It's going to be amazing having free live traffic data integrated into Google Navigation. The only thing I haven't seen is whether there's a way to tell the app to "avoid traffic" when constructing a route, or to "detour around traffic" if traffic develops along the way. But that should be pretty easy to add if they haven't already; just another little algorithm.
And that's the *other* great thing about this - free updates. I had to pay $80 for map and interface upgrades to my Magellan Roadmate 2200T, and while it was worth it, they only ever produced that one update and I sure would have liked it to be free. Especially considering that the update itself has its own problems, which I have now just had to live with - for example, it now messes up the side of the street destinations are on about half the time. No way to fix this except to buy a new device with new software on it. It also constantly drives me into a dead end when I go to my mother's house - the map is out of date. Again, no more updates are coming - gotta buy a new device. Waste of money.
I think "hard sci-fi" writers who fail to recognize that not all sci-fi is about technology and its effect on humanity are rather short-sighted.
I agree, and another argument you could make is to imagine our current lives being imagined by sci-fi writers 200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?). Most of them probably *would* have focused on our technology, and maybe some of them would have gotten some of it right. And there are stories to tell about how the internet or the cell phone has altered the way we live, but honestly, do you really think about these things throughout an average day? You use your technology, but you're mostly thinking about how to get into the pants of that girl you've got a crush on, or you're thinking about how school or work sucks, or you're thinking about drinking a Shamrock Shake. The technology you use can be a means to these ends, but it's not the end itself.
Most current sci-fi is, like most media in other genres, a form of realism. It's not an attempt at predicting the future of technology or asking "what if?" or related existential questions, it's an attempt at looking at what real life might be like for people in various situations in the future. Nobody in the real world of Star Trek, except maybe a few intellectuals back on Earth, is going to ruminate on how flux capacitors have changed the way we live, or on what happens to your soul when you use a transporter. Most people are just going to use those things and not think about it, the same way we all drive cars and communicate on cell phones and write blog replies on laptops now without thinking much about it. This is just our lives.
A perfect example of this would be the use of guns for self-defense and home defense. You'd think, from watching the news, that a law-abiding citizen who legally carries a gun has never stopped a crime.
No, what you'd think - if you actually read more news than you obviously have - is the truth. That statistically, law-abiding citizens who carry guns are much more likely to be shot dead - often with their own guns or those owned by their loved ones - than law-abiding citizens who don't.
You are a perfect example of those who believe journalism is a bullshit profession because your own personal views are not reinforced by the news you read. But the problem for you is that your personal views are not supported by day to day facts and events, and this is what you're reading about. While I doubt any journalist has ever said or written that a gun-toting citizen has "never" stopped a crime, statistically it is much more likely that they will be a victim of gun violence than the opposite, and that is likely what you are reading about - because it just happens a lot more often. Journalists can only report what is happening - it's not their job to make up facts to suit some bias. That is in fact what this thread is all about.
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.
All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about looking at a screen and picking something off a "ribbon" at the top of a bar over a bunch of text and images? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.
And there is just no reason to have to learn a new system when we have all already learned how to use menus. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in Word because of the stupid ribbon, and I've basically given up on the whole app because of it. I used to use it for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Wordpad for most other things that I can't use Notepad for. (My version of Wordpad still has menus; I didn't realize there was a version with the ribbon. Now I know to avoid it.)
You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to use menus, but smart enough to learn a whole new system that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.
This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.
There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)
And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.
All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.
I can confirm personally that the North American launch model is also affected by the YLOD issue, as I had my PS3 reflowed a month ago to cure its YLOD.
No, you can confirm that your own personal PS3 broke. That's it. You cannot confirm that there's some systemic problem with launch US PS3's.
I also have a launch PS3 and it's fine. Does that mean I can "confirm" that there's no YLOD problem with US PS3's?
I'm inclined to believe the "nobody has made a better violin in 300 years" argument because I know from my own personal experience that nobody has made a better electric guitar than those early Fenders in 50 years either.
Actually, strike that - I'm sure that both arguments are overly broad, and not really what any of these people actually mean... 1950's and 60's Fender guitars all have a particular tone to them that just can't be precisely duplicated anymore (be it a Strat, Jazzmaster, or whatever). That doesn't mean that the current ones suck, or that you can't get really, really close to that old tone if you try really hard, but if you do want *that* specific tone, then the easiest way to get it is to just buy an original Fender.
I would doubt very much that classical music aficionados really consider the Strad the only violin worth listening to, more that they associate it with a particular tone that they like and that's very hard to duplicate today. Ditto for electric guitars - there are some great-sounding modern guitars on the market today making some great music, they just don't sound like guitars of yesteryear and that happens to be the sound a lot of people want to duplicate because that's the sound most associated with the kind of music they want to play. Rock bands of the 1960's were using guitars made in the 1950's and 1960's. Classical musicians in the 1600's and 1700's were using violins made in the 1600's and 1700's. So I think a lot of it is just trying to duplicate what people consider an "authentic" sound for a particular type of music, it's not that one instrument or another is the "best" or that you aren't perfectly valid in preferring something else.
But different instruments are better or worse for different things, and just like trying to play the Beatles with a Schecter Hellraiser is not going to sound quite right, I would imagine the same is probably true for some people when talking modern violins and certain types of classical music.
However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.
The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.
As a guitarist, I disagree with this conclusion. The mistake I think you're making is in equating the fact that these people couldn't hear the difference with a conclusion that the difference therefore can't be heard. I don't think that follows, anymore than it follows to say that because somebody can't tell the difference between a Sizzler steak and a carefully prepared Wagyu steak at a fine restaurant means there is none.
I think a more reasonable conclusion is to say that a lot of people who consider themselves to have refined ears, don't. But that doesn't mean there aren't objectively measurable differences in sound quality, assuming you brought in equipment that was sensitive enough.
I say all this because as a guitar *player*, I, like the violin players in your example, can easily tell the difference between guitars of different makes just by listening to them, and I can do it with near-100% reliability, at least for the most popular makes and models. A Strat and a Les Paul don't even sound close to similar, for example, and an American Strat doesn't even sound like a Chinese Strat (though it sounds closer than a Les Paul). I guarantee that 99% of the rest of the world, though - even many rock music lovers - could not make these kinds of distinctions. There is a difference between knowing what a Fender Strat *is* and knowing how it *sounds* - the latter requires actually using one and then using other models and comparing it, or at the very least actively listening to others doing the same, repeatedly. (And by "actively" I mean really paying attention to this specific facet of the music, what guitar is being played when.)
So I would say that this has more to do with having a trained ear or not than with whether or not there are real differences in sound. If the players can so easily identify the differences, then there probably are differences, and not just in playability. They're the ones that hear these things the most, and also develop the "sense memory" to associate a particular tone with a particular instrument. That's a unique skill that most people never develop.
Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".
What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.
10 Text Messages / day * 30.5 day/mo = 305 Text Messages / Month
Compared to 2000 / month is less than an order of magnitude. However approaching 100 per day does seem high, until you consider that they're messaging with multiple friends and unlike most email, texting is usually sentences back and forth (a conversation) instead of larger blocks of thoughts at a time.
The part that seems most ridiculous for this is that carriers charge a default rate of $.25 per message if you don't have some kind of plan.
And I'm sure that most people do. But what's really ridiculous is that at least some carriers charge separately for "text" and "data". You can get an unlimited data plan on AT&T - but it doesn't include text! wtf? That's like your ISP saying you have unlimited download bandwidth except for.txt files, which will cost you an extra $5 per month.
Anyway, a little while ago I would have thought 2,000 texts per month was ridiculous. But now that my wife has an iPhone and I have an HTC Fuze, I actually find myself struggling to keep under the 200 messages per month we're both allotted on our $5 per month plan. It's just much easier to text about stuff like whether or not we need milk or whether I'll be working late or something than it is to actually call each other about those things (and it's not like we don't get to talk in person enough). And we're just two people - if I was a teenager with a circle of 100 friends again, I can easily see myself sending 2,000 texts per month or more. And I never considered myself all that popular in school.
When I had a dumbphone with a standard keypad, pretty much the most I could stomach typing out was the train I was on on my way home... and that was just numbers. But it's like the world changes once you get a phone with a qwerty keyboard and a decent OS. I'm the kind of person that really doesn't like getting sucked in to lengthy conversations on the phone - and I *hate* having to sit next to other people that obviously don't share the same aversion - so I'm happy to be firing off emails and texts instead and then replying to the replies I get only when and if I want to. I don't even think it's got anything to do with a person's age, except maybe that younger people adopt new technology quicker. But I'm 37 and my wife is 38 and now that we've got smartphones, we use them the same ways any teenager would.
The DSLR camera I want to get, the Canon prosumer model EOS 5D Mark II has a 21.1 Megapixel sensor than can put out a 60MB raw file. Process it and edit in Photoshop and the file could be 500MB.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but Photoshop's default format (.psd) is a compressed format. Unless you are making an advertisement out of it, with a lot of layers and effects, it will never be bigger on disk than the RAW file.
If you're talking about saving as a tiff or something, then yeah, those file sizes can blow up pretty big. But even most pros don't do that anymore because it's wildly inefficient - there are just better file formats to use except in certain specific types of situations.
So what? If you can't take people calling you on it, take it out of your sig. Freedom of speech is a two way street. If you're going to have it in there, people are going to call you out.
2 - It was designed to make people think about how relative all these labels are and how we judge people.
"Designed"? You've got delusions of grandeur. You put a dumb phrase in your sig designed to make some naive point that's been made a hundred thousand times already by lots of other faux-intellectuals. You didn't "design" anything.
If the south had won he'd be considered a war hero.
If the south had won he'd likely be considered a war hero by a small subset of the more insane southerners. No one else. Northerners would still hate him, as would any southerners who value a) human life, and b) a sense of honor and fairness in war. And quite honestly, a lot of southerners do fit that description.
Do you seriously think the country as it stands now, with the north winners of the war, would be celebrating whoever had managed to assassinate Jefferson Davis as a war hero?
He's no different then Washington was to the british during the war of independence.
Honestly, are you really fucking serious? George Washington did not walk up behind King George and shoot him in the back of the head. For crying out loud.
Or if you want a more modern angle, use Osama with the radical muslim. They lost, so he's a terrorist.
You've apparently taken the "history is written by the winners" line and corrupted it so completely that even that naive idea has lost all coherence.
And it is a naive idea because winners win for many real reasons - it is not by chance. And one of those reasons is that walking up behind people and shooting them in the back of the head is pretty much universally seen as a cowardly, heinous act that virtually nobody of any sane mind would support. Whichever side in any conflict engages in that kind of behavior is going to lose the public's support virtually instantly. Did Booth's action re-galvanize the south? No, it in fact turned Lincoln into a sympathetic figure. He helped the south lose. Sure, they had lost militarily before that, but his action made it easier for the north to reintegrate the south into the union.
Here, be my guest and change this passage in Wikipedia if you so believe in what you're saying:
Even in the South, sorrow was expressed in some quarters. In Savannah, Georgia, where the mayor and city council addressed a vast throng at an outdoor gathering to express their indignation, many in the crowd wept. Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston called Booth's act "a disgrace to the age". Robert E. Lee also expressed regret at Lincoln's death by Booth's hand.
Your sig is moronic, so go ahead and leave it there if that's what you want people to think of you.
George Washington and the other militia members in the late 1700s were also "murders", and even "traitors". Nowadays they're revered as heroes.
Yeah, they were pretty much revered as heroes in the late 1700's too.
Bone up on your history, son, and quit thinking that saying everything was the opposite of how it was makes you sound smart.
If you're trying to make a point that the only thing that separates murder from war is perspective, then a) your naivete is pretty astounding, and b) you're making a nonsensical argument anyway, because making that point necessitates looking at the situation from two different sides, not the same one.
Just wondering, is the NY MTA public or privatized?
Third time here I'm saying this, but since you actually asked, they're quasi-private. The authority situation in New York is murky, but the whole reason these things exist is so that they are not treated by law as government agencies. They are government-sanctioned and government-subsidized, but privately managed and run, with basically no accountability to any government agency or the public.
This is where one could say, once again, that government-run activities suck.
The MTA is not a government-run agency. It's an authority, an independent organization that relies only partially on a government subsidy. Yes, it takes government money, but more in the way that Blackwater takes government money than the way the US Army takes government money.
Anyway, as these things go, the MTA is not nearly as badly managed as you might think. The NY transit system is massive, it's very old, and it was formed out of disparate lines that had nothing to do with each other whatsoever before the MTA took them over. Consider that the MTA not only runs what is by some measures the largest subway system in the world, but also one of the largest bus systems in the world and two of the largest commuter railroads in the world. And the LIRR by itself has more track miles than the Tokaido Shinkansen line in Japan, so the scale here is not something I think most people outside of New York ever imagine. All things considered, I think they've done a pretty good job getting people where they need to go over the years. Granted, I complain about them as much as anybody in my day to day life, mostly about the fare hikes, but most of that's bills coming due from the 1970's, when government slashed the subsidy and the agency was forced to defer billions in basic maintenance and upgrades. When people demanded better service (as in, for example, elevated stations that did not literally rain rusted steel down on pedestrians below), the government would only give them loans for capital improvements rather than increasing the subsidy.
Also, believe it or not but some New York authorities are actually profitable. The bridge and tunnel authority, which is actually now owned by the MTA, has always been profitable and in fact helps subsidize the rest of the MTA. Without it, the MTA probably could not survive, because the government subsidy it receives is a pittance in percentage terms compared to other transit systems around the country and the world.
Another reason these schedules are not copyrightable is because the MTA is owned by the NY government, and the NY government is owned/funded by the People, therefore the schedules belong to the citizens of New York State.
Authorities are not "owned" by the NY government. This is one of the big issues with authorities in New York - they were invented precisely because they are independent of state government (they're designed as a workaround for various inconvenient state laws). The state has no direct control over the MTA or any other authority, and the authority's finances are intentionally kept separate. For all intents and purposes, authorities are simply very large non-profit organizations that have been granted broad powers by the state to provide public services, and have governing boards comprised of state and local officials, among others.
Some authorities are actually completely financially independent; they're not subsidized at all. The MTA is not in that category, but it does make more of its own money than any other transit system in the world. Its subsidy is relatively small in percentage terms, and it is not direct government funding, like an agency. It's an agreement that needs to be negotiated and renewed every few years.
I'm not disagreeing that this stuff can't be copyrighted, I'm just saying it's not for the reason you provided. There's no direct link between any NY authority and the taxpayer. There are indirect links, but it's not an unbroken chain between authority and taxpayer.
You can probably figure this out based on sales of games released simultaneously on different platforms. It won't be 100% accurate for a variety of reasons, but given a sample of enough titles in different genres, it will probably be pretty close.
I haven't done this myself but it would be an interesting project. With this data, you could at least figure out an approximate relative number of systems in actual use.
For example, if Madden 10 sells 300,000 copies on the 360 in its first month, and 200,000 copies on the PS3, and if other games were selling at that same ratio, then you could reasonably conclude that there are 50% more Xbox 360's in use than PS3's (or at least that there's at least one 360 in 50% more households than PS3). You could then look at the hardware sales data and see if that matches the sales advantage the 360 has. If it does not, then you could pretty reasonably conclude that the additional 360's being sold are either replacements for broken systems, or second 360's being bought by someone who already owns one.
I remember I did do this just for kicks in the PS2 era, because at that time the tables were turned and it was de rigeur to claim that all of the PS2's sales (especially later in its lifespan) were people replacing broken systems. But the game sales didn't support this - sales of multiplatform games always showed almost the exact same sales ratio as you'd expect given the total installed base of all three systems on the market at the time.
If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.
First of all, why? MS's instructions if your Xbox 360 fails is to send it back to them. The retailer has nothing to do with it.
Second, we did hear from MS themselves that the Xbox 360 suffered from a series of design flaws leading to various types of breakdowns. It was a big story for a while, if you don't remember. MS set aside more than $1 billion to deal with it. I and others figured out that that kind of money would cover the repairs on every single Xbox sold to that point, leading me (and others) to conclude that the expected failure rate must be close to 100%.
If MS had instead asked Gamestop to foot the $1 billion bill for defective Xbox 360's, you're damn right we would have heard about it from the retailers before now.
The failure rate for PS3s in this survey is 10 times higher than other published figures (reports have the actual PS3 failure rate at around 1%, which is in-line with normal manufacturing expectations).
No, it isn't. Where are you getting these figures from?
And you're the one that needs to learn what a control is. A control is simply a test designed to eliminate variables to validate comparison. That is exactly what having the Wii and PS3 in this same survey does. If you want to argue that there's self-selection bias going on here, then you're going to have to explain why it apparently only applies to the Xbox 360 and not the other two consoles. Are Xbox 360 owners just a bigger bunch of whiners?
Even if you're saying that all of the consoles suffer from the same self-selection bias, then you're still left with the Xbox 360 having a failure rate between 5 and 8 times that of the other two systems. Nothing changes that.
But I can tell you as someone who worked in the home electronics industry for many years, there has never been a product on the market in that industry with a failure rate of less than 1%. So I have no idea where you're getting this figure.
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%
1% is just as ridiculous a number as 54%, if not moreso, because we've all seen widespread reports of 360's failing. But a 1% failure rate of any electronic product is almost unheard-of, especially one with moving parts.
Generally speaking, a failure rate of 5-10% is considered normal. So the PS3's failure rate is slightly high, but I actually wouldn't expect different from a system that was so bleeding-edge at the time it was launched, and that generated such a massive amount of heat and had an unproven cooling system design.
Both the Wii and PS3 have numbers that are basically in the expected range. So those serve as your "control", and any self selection bias would be apparent in those numbers as well. The fact is the 360 numbers are coming from the same survey and are 5 times higher than the PS3 and about 8 times higher than the Wii. And this is not a small sample here either. This is meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely enough, I agree with this. I'm definitely not against taxes in general and sales tax specifically, but it doesn't make sense to me that a retailer should be required to lift a finger to help a state government from which it gets nothing in return. Those taxes are not going back to Amazon; those taxes are going to pay for things like police and schools in the community in which the *buyer* resides. And yes, the buyer is the one actually paying the tax, but it is ridiculous to expect a company outside of the state to pay any of their own money (in time and effort) to do the work of collecting that tax when they have no say over whether and how that tax is collected.
The states' beef is with the buyers, the actual payers of the tax, who then see the benefits from those taxes. They should be the ones required to collect their own taxes, not the retailers who will never see a dime of the money they spend collecting the tax come back.
This is really no different than what the RIAA is doing. It's the same mentality; if you can't get recourse with the people who you actually should be going after, then just go screw somebody else somewhere up the chain instead.
Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.
Oh, this is bullshit. We put up with it because we're conditioned to put up with all manner of mediocrity, lies, and incompetence in this country. This is only one example of it. Our leaders are another, but WE voted for them.
People always want to put the blame on someone other than themselves. But the people who are responsible for this kind of crap in this country are US. We are responsible because we expect it and we do nothing about it.
If we don't want to put up with shit like this, then we should be electing people based on how they specifically say they're going to respond to these kinds of shenanigans. But we don't. Instead, we vote for people because it looks like they have a nice family in TV commercials, or because they're against teh gays, or because they claim to adhere to some poorly defined set of values (ie. "family values", "conservative principles", etc.).
THAT IS OUR FAULT.
When you see 6-10% of people undecided in the final days of a national election (as was the case in 2008), what does that tell you? It doesn't tell you that we have a bunch of independent thinkers, as those people and the media will claim, it tells you that we have a bunch of people in this country who aren't paying any attention at all. Not only do they not understand the candidates' stances on the issues they care about, they don't even know the broad ideologies of the parties they belong to - they can't even make an assumption based on party affiliation or label. These are the people that often decide our elections.
And when you couple this lack of paying attention with the ridiculously low voting rates we have in this country compared with other democracies, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Ironically, the places you need GPS the most are the places there is no cell phone coverage. As much as I like my Android its my Garmin that goes into the backpack.
In other words, the way you personally use your GPS device must be the way everyone else does, right?
You talk about putting your Garmin into your "backpack" and using it where there is no cell phone service. That's sounding to me like you're taking it hiking out in the back country. Which is fine, but that is not what most people use GPS for these days, nor is it what Google Navigation is intended for. It's intended for use while driving. (Indeed, many GPS devices produced these days will not work when off-road.)
Most places in the United States where there's a road, there's cell phone service. No, maybe not on some rural route in Idaho, but certainly in the most populated areas. And while it may seem counterintuitive, it is actually more helpful to have GPS for car navigation in the most populated areas than it is in the least, the reason being that there are so many more roads, which means so many more turns. To get from my store in Manhattan to my home just outside the city - a distance of approximately 14 miles - requires something like 45 different maneuvers and the use of about that many different roads.
Now, the REAL killer app for Google Navigation, which will be apparent to all eventually if it isn't now, is free cloud-provided live traffic. Most current GPS devices that provide traffic info (and remember, they all force you to pay for it in some way) do it the old fashioned way, usually by subscribing to a service that's taking call-in reports from local police or utilities, or even individual commuters. This info is always old and often wrong. Google Maps' traffic is live, taken from the cloud. Right now, my wife and I have gotten into the habit of having our GPS hooked up and having one of our phones out with Google Maps loaded up to check traffic on our route. (Remember, this is New York.) And it's always right, but there's currently no easy way for us to do anything about it when our GPS device guides us into a "red" traffic area. (We can press the "detour" button, but that doesn't really guide us around traffic, just a pre-set distance.)
It's going to be amazing having free live traffic data integrated into Google Navigation. The only thing I haven't seen is whether there's a way to tell the app to "avoid traffic" when constructing a route, or to "detour around traffic" if traffic develops along the way. But that should be pretty easy to add if they haven't already; just another little algorithm.
And that's the *other* great thing about this - free updates. I had to pay $80 for map and interface upgrades to my Magellan Roadmate 2200T, and while it was worth it, they only ever produced that one update and I sure would have liked it to be free. Especially considering that the update itself has its own problems, which I have now just had to live with - for example, it now messes up the side of the street destinations are on about half the time. No way to fix this except to buy a new device with new software on it. It also constantly drives me into a dead end when I go to my mother's house - the map is out of date. Again, no more updates are coming - gotta buy a new device. Waste of money.
I think "hard sci-fi" writers who fail to recognize that not all sci-fi is about technology and its effect on humanity are rather short-sighted.
I agree, and another argument you could make is to imagine our current lives being imagined by sci-fi writers 200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?). Most of them probably *would* have focused on our technology, and maybe some of them would have gotten some of it right. And there are stories to tell about how the internet or the cell phone has altered the way we live, but honestly, do you really think about these things throughout an average day? You use your technology, but you're mostly thinking about how to get into the pants of that girl you've got a crush on, or you're thinking about how school or work sucks, or you're thinking about drinking a Shamrock Shake. The technology you use can be a means to these ends, but it's not the end itself.
Most current sci-fi is, like most media in other genres, a form of realism. It's not an attempt at predicting the future of technology or asking "what if?" or related existential questions, it's an attempt at looking at what real life might be like for people in various situations in the future. Nobody in the real world of Star Trek, except maybe a few intellectuals back on Earth, is going to ruminate on how flux capacitors have changed the way we live, or on what happens to your soul when you use a transporter. Most people are just going to use those things and not think about it, the same way we all drive cars and communicate on cell phones and write blog replies on laptops now without thinking much about it. This is just our lives.
A perfect example of this would be the use of guns for self-defense and home defense. You'd think, from watching the news, that a law-abiding citizen who legally carries a gun has never stopped a crime.
No, what you'd think - if you actually read more news than you obviously have - is the truth. That statistically, law-abiding citizens who carry guns are much more likely to be shot dead - often with their own guns or those owned by their loved ones - than law-abiding citizens who don't.
You are a perfect example of those who believe journalism is a bullshit profession because your own personal views are not reinforced by the news you read. But the problem for you is that your personal views are not supported by day to day facts and events, and this is what you're reading about. While I doubt any journalist has ever said or written that a gun-toting citizen has "never" stopped a crime, statistically it is much more likely that they will be a victim of gun violence than the opposite, and that is likely what you are reading about - because it just happens a lot more often. Journalists can only report what is happening - it's not their job to make up facts to suit some bias. That is in fact what this thread is all about.
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.
All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about looking at a screen and picking something off a "ribbon" at the top of a bar over a bunch of text and images? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.
And there is just no reason to have to learn a new system when we have all already learned how to use menus. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in Word because of the stupid ribbon, and I've basically given up on the whole app because of it. I used to use it for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Wordpad for most other things that I can't use Notepad for. (My version of Wordpad still has menus; I didn't realize there was a version with the ribbon. Now I know to avoid it.)
You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to use menus, but smart enough to learn a whole new system that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.
This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.
There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)
And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.
All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.
I can confirm personally that the North American launch model is also affected by the YLOD issue, as I had my PS3 reflowed a month ago to cure its YLOD.
No, you can confirm that your own personal PS3 broke. That's it. You cannot confirm that there's some systemic problem with launch US PS3's.
I also have a launch PS3 and it's fine. Does that mean I can "confirm" that there's no YLOD problem with US PS3's?
Old Strats are popular for a reason, too.
Was gonna say the same thing.
I'm inclined to believe the "nobody has made a better violin in 300 years" argument because I know from my own personal experience that nobody has made a better electric guitar than those early Fenders in 50 years either.
Actually, strike that - I'm sure that both arguments are overly broad, and not really what any of these people actually mean... 1950's and 60's Fender guitars all have a particular tone to them that just can't be precisely duplicated anymore (be it a Strat, Jazzmaster, or whatever). That doesn't mean that the current ones suck, or that you can't get really, really close to that old tone if you try really hard, but if you do want *that* specific tone, then the easiest way to get it is to just buy an original Fender.
I would doubt very much that classical music aficionados really consider the Strad the only violin worth listening to, more that they associate it with a particular tone that they like and that's very hard to duplicate today. Ditto for electric guitars - there are some great-sounding modern guitars on the market today making some great music, they just don't sound like guitars of yesteryear and that happens to be the sound a lot of people want to duplicate because that's the sound most associated with the kind of music they want to play. Rock bands of the 1960's were using guitars made in the 1950's and 1960's. Classical musicians in the 1600's and 1700's were using violins made in the 1600's and 1700's. So I think a lot of it is just trying to duplicate what people consider an "authentic" sound for a particular type of music, it's not that one instrument or another is the "best" or that you aren't perfectly valid in preferring something else.
But different instruments are better or worse for different things, and just like trying to play the Beatles with a Schecter Hellraiser is not going to sound quite right, I would imagine the same is probably true for some people when talking modern violins and certain types of classical music.
However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.
The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.
As a guitarist, I disagree with this conclusion. The mistake I think you're making is in equating the fact that these people couldn't hear the difference with a conclusion that the difference therefore can't be heard. I don't think that follows, anymore than it follows to say that because somebody can't tell the difference between a Sizzler steak and a carefully prepared Wagyu steak at a fine restaurant means there is none.
I think a more reasonable conclusion is to say that a lot of people who consider themselves to have refined ears, don't. But that doesn't mean there aren't objectively measurable differences in sound quality, assuming you brought in equipment that was sensitive enough.
I say all this because as a guitar *player*, I, like the violin players in your example, can easily tell the difference between guitars of different makes just by listening to them, and I can do it with near-100% reliability, at least for the most popular makes and models. A Strat and a Les Paul don't even sound close to similar, for example, and an American Strat doesn't even sound like a Chinese Strat (though it sounds closer than a Les Paul). I guarantee that 99% of the rest of the world, though - even many rock music lovers - could not make these kinds of distinctions. There is a difference between knowing what a Fender Strat *is* and knowing how it *sounds* - the latter requires actually using one and then using other models and comparing it, or at the very least actively listening to others doing the same, repeatedly. (And by "actively" I mean really paying attention to this specific facet of the music, what guitar is being played when.)
So I would say that this has more to do with having a trained ear or not than with whether or not there are real differences in sound. If the players can so easily identify the differences, then there probably are differences, and not just in playability. They're the ones that hear these things the most, and also develop the "sense memory" to associate a particular tone with a particular instrument. That's a unique skill that most people never develop.
That's your blind test, right there.
Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".
What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.
In case they can't do it themselves:
10 Text Messages / day * 30.5 day/mo = 305 Text Messages / Month
Compared to 2000 / month is less than an order of magnitude. However approaching 100 per day does seem high, until you consider that they're messaging with multiple friends and unlike most email, texting is usually sentences back and forth (a conversation) instead of larger blocks of thoughts at a time.
The part that seems most ridiculous for this is that carriers charge a default rate of $.25 per message if you don't have some kind of plan.
And I'm sure that most people do. But what's really ridiculous is that at least some carriers charge separately for "text" and "data". You can get an unlimited data plan on AT&T - but it doesn't include text! wtf? That's like your ISP saying you have unlimited download bandwidth except for .txt files, which will cost you an extra $5 per month.
Anyway, a little while ago I would have thought 2,000 texts per month was ridiculous. But now that my wife has an iPhone and I have an HTC Fuze, I actually find myself struggling to keep under the 200 messages per month we're both allotted on our $5 per month plan. It's just much easier to text about stuff like whether or not we need milk or whether I'll be working late or something than it is to actually call each other about those things (and it's not like we don't get to talk in person enough). And we're just two people - if I was a teenager with a circle of 100 friends again, I can easily see myself sending 2,000 texts per month or more. And I never considered myself all that popular in school.
When I had a dumbphone with a standard keypad, pretty much the most I could stomach typing out was the train I was on on my way home... and that was just numbers. But it's like the world changes once you get a phone with a qwerty keyboard and a decent OS. I'm the kind of person that really doesn't like getting sucked in to lengthy conversations on the phone - and I *hate* having to sit next to other people that obviously don't share the same aversion - so I'm happy to be firing off emails and texts instead and then replying to the replies I get only when and if I want to. I don't even think it's got anything to do with a person's age, except maybe that younger people adopt new technology quicker. But I'm 37 and my wife is 38 and now that we've got smartphones, we use them the same ways any teenager would.
The DSLR camera I want to get, the Canon prosumer model EOS 5D Mark II has a 21.1 Megapixel sensor than can put out a 60MB raw file. Process it and edit in Photoshop and the file could be 500MB.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but Photoshop's default format (.psd) is a compressed format. Unless you are making an advertisement out of it, with a lot of layers and effects, it will never be bigger on disk than the RAW file.
If you're talking about saving as a tiff or something, then yeah, those file sizes can blow up pretty big. But even most pros don't do that anymore because it's wildly inefficient - there are just better file formats to use except in certain specific types of situations.
1 - its OT here.
So what? If you can't take people calling you on it, take it out of your sig. Freedom of speech is a two way street. If you're going to have it in there, people are going to call you out.
2 - It was designed to make people think about how relative all these labels are and how we judge people.
"Designed"? You've got delusions of grandeur. You put a dumb phrase in your sig designed to make some naive point that's been made a hundred thousand times already by lots of other faux-intellectuals. You didn't "design" anything.
If the south had won he'd be considered a war hero.
If the south had won he'd likely be considered a war hero by a small subset of the more insane southerners. No one else. Northerners would still hate him, as would any southerners who value a) human life, and b) a sense of honor and fairness in war. And quite honestly, a lot of southerners do fit that description.
Do you seriously think the country as it stands now, with the north winners of the war, would be celebrating whoever had managed to assassinate Jefferson Davis as a war hero?
He's no different then Washington was to the british during the war of independence.
Honestly, are you really fucking serious? George Washington did not walk up behind King George and shoot him in the back of the head. For crying out loud.
Or if you want a more modern angle, use Osama with the radical muslim. They lost, so he's a terrorist.
You've apparently taken the "history is written by the winners" line and corrupted it so completely that even that naive idea has lost all coherence.
And it is a naive idea because winners win for many real reasons - it is not by chance. And one of those reasons is that walking up behind people and shooting them in the back of the head is pretty much universally seen as a cowardly, heinous act that virtually nobody of any sane mind would support. Whichever side in any conflict engages in that kind of behavior is going to lose the public's support virtually instantly. Did Booth's action re-galvanize the south? No, it in fact turned Lincoln into a sympathetic figure. He helped the south lose. Sure, they had lost militarily before that, but his action made it easier for the north to reintegrate the south into the union.
Here, be my guest and change this passage in Wikipedia if you so believe in what you're saying:
Even in the South, sorrow was expressed in some quarters. In Savannah, Georgia, where the mayor and city council addressed a vast throng at an outdoor gathering to express their indignation, many in the crowd wept. Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston called Booth's act "a disgrace to the age". Robert E. Lee also expressed regret at Lincoln's death by Booth's hand.
Your sig is moronic, so go ahead and leave it there if that's what you want people to think of you.
George Washington and the other militia members in the late 1700s were also "murders", and even "traitors". Nowadays they're revered as heroes.
Yeah, they were pretty much revered as heroes in the late 1700's too.
Bone up on your history, son, and quit thinking that saying everything was the opposite of how it was makes you sound smart.
If you're trying to make a point that the only thing that separates murder from war is perspective, then a) your naivete is pretty astounding, and b) you're making a nonsensical argument anyway, because making that point necessitates looking at the situation from two different sides, not the same one.
Just wondering, is the NY MTA public or privatized?
Third time here I'm saying this, but since you actually asked, they're quasi-private. The authority situation in New York is murky, but the whole reason these things exist is so that they are not treated by law as government agencies. They are government-sanctioned and government-subsidized, but privately managed and run, with basically no accountability to any government agency or the public.
In an ideal world MTA would come up with a way to accommodate what is obviously a public demand for the information.
Try Google Maps.
Seriously, try it. It's pretty neat the way they've integrated MTA schedules, with the MTA's blessing.
(Works with Amtrak too, btw.)
This is where one could say, once again, that government-run activities suck.
The MTA is not a government-run agency. It's an authority, an independent organization that relies only partially on a government subsidy. Yes, it takes government money, but more in the way that Blackwater takes government money than the way the US Army takes government money.
Anyway, as these things go, the MTA is not nearly as badly managed as you might think. The NY transit system is massive, it's very old, and it was formed out of disparate lines that had nothing to do with each other whatsoever before the MTA took them over. Consider that the MTA not only runs what is by some measures the largest subway system in the world, but also one of the largest bus systems in the world and two of the largest commuter railroads in the world. And the LIRR by itself has more track miles than the Tokaido Shinkansen line in Japan, so the scale here is not something I think most people outside of New York ever imagine. All things considered, I think they've done a pretty good job getting people where they need to go over the years. Granted, I complain about them as much as anybody in my day to day life, mostly about the fare hikes, but most of that's bills coming due from the 1970's, when government slashed the subsidy and the agency was forced to defer billions in basic maintenance and upgrades. When people demanded better service (as in, for example, elevated stations that did not literally rain rusted steel down on pedestrians below), the government would only give them loans for capital improvements rather than increasing the subsidy.
Also, believe it or not but some New York authorities are actually profitable. The bridge and tunnel authority, which is actually now owned by the MTA, has always been profitable and in fact helps subsidize the rest of the MTA. Without it, the MTA probably could not survive, because the government subsidy it receives is a pittance in percentage terms compared to other transit systems around the country and the world.
Another reason these schedules are not copyrightable is because the MTA is owned by the NY government, and the NY government is owned/funded by the People, therefore the schedules belong to the citizens of New York State.
Authorities are not "owned" by the NY government. This is one of the big issues with authorities in New York - they were invented precisely because they are independent of state government (they're designed as a workaround for various inconvenient state laws). The state has no direct control over the MTA or any other authority, and the authority's finances are intentionally kept separate. For all intents and purposes, authorities are simply very large non-profit organizations that have been granted broad powers by the state to provide public services, and have governing boards comprised of state and local officials, among others.
Some authorities are actually completely financially independent; they're not subsidized at all. The MTA is not in that category, but it does make more of its own money than any other transit system in the world. Its subsidy is relatively small in percentage terms, and it is not direct government funding, like an agency. It's an agreement that needs to be negotiated and renewed every few years.
I'm not disagreeing that this stuff can't be copyrighted, I'm just saying it's not for the reason you provided. There's no direct link between any NY authority and the taxpayer. There are indirect links, but it's not an unbroken chain between authority and taxpayer.
You can probably figure this out based on sales of games released simultaneously on different platforms. It won't be 100% accurate for a variety of reasons, but given a sample of enough titles in different genres, it will probably be pretty close.
I haven't done this myself but it would be an interesting project. With this data, you could at least figure out an approximate relative number of systems in actual use.
For example, if Madden 10 sells 300,000 copies on the 360 in its first month, and 200,000 copies on the PS3, and if other games were selling at that same ratio, then you could reasonably conclude that there are 50% more Xbox 360's in use than PS3's (or at least that there's at least one 360 in 50% more households than PS3). You could then look at the hardware sales data and see if that matches the sales advantage the 360 has. If it does not, then you could pretty reasonably conclude that the additional 360's being sold are either replacements for broken systems, or second 360's being bought by someone who already owns one.
I remember I did do this just for kicks in the PS2 era, because at that time the tables were turned and it was de rigeur to claim that all of the PS2's sales (especially later in its lifespan) were people replacing broken systems. But the game sales didn't support this - sales of multiplatform games always showed almost the exact same sales ratio as you'd expect given the total installed base of all three systems on the market at the time.
If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.
First of all, why? MS's instructions if your Xbox 360 fails is to send it back to them. The retailer has nothing to do with it.
Second, we did hear from MS themselves that the Xbox 360 suffered from a series of design flaws leading to various types of breakdowns. It was a big story for a while, if you don't remember. MS set aside more than $1 billion to deal with it. I and others figured out that that kind of money would cover the repairs on every single Xbox sold to that point, leading me (and others) to conclude that the expected failure rate must be close to 100%.
If MS had instead asked Gamestop to foot the $1 billion bill for defective Xbox 360's, you're damn right we would have heard about it from the retailers before now.
Lifetime failure rates never go down. They only ever go up. In the 360's case, they are going up very, very fast.
Or are you saying that millions of PS3's will suddenly commit suicide this year, thereby equalizing the percentages at somewhere around 60%?
The failure rate for PS3s in this survey is 10 times higher than other published figures (reports have the actual PS3 failure rate at around 1%, which is in-line with normal manufacturing expectations).
No, it isn't. Where are you getting these figures from?
And you're the one that needs to learn what a control is. A control is simply a test designed to eliminate variables to validate comparison. That is exactly what having the Wii and PS3 in this same survey does. If you want to argue that there's self-selection bias going on here, then you're going to have to explain why it apparently only applies to the Xbox 360 and not the other two consoles. Are Xbox 360 owners just a bigger bunch of whiners?
Even if you're saying that all of the consoles suffer from the same self-selection bias, then you're still left with the Xbox 360 having a failure rate between 5 and 8 times that of the other two systems. Nothing changes that.
But I can tell you as someone who worked in the home electronics industry for many years, there has never been a product on the market in that industry with a failure rate of less than 1%. So I have no idea where you're getting this figure.
Except for a broken leg, a shattered skull and a gunshot to the heart, I'm completely uninjured!
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%
1% is just as ridiculous a number as 54%, if not moreso, because we've all seen widespread reports of 360's failing. But a 1% failure rate of any electronic product is almost unheard-of, especially one with moving parts.
Generally speaking, a failure rate of 5-10% is considered normal. So the PS3's failure rate is slightly high, but I actually wouldn't expect different from a system that was so bleeding-edge at the time it was launched, and that generated such a massive amount of heat and had an unproven cooling system design.
Both the Wii and PS3 have numbers that are basically in the expected range. So those serve as your "control", and any self selection bias would be apparent in those numbers as well. The fact is the 360 numbers are coming from the same survey and are 5 times higher than the PS3 and about 8 times higher than the Wii. And this is not a small sample here either. This is meaningful.