What is so magical about a refurbished Mac that Amazon and Apple can legally collude to prevent the perfectly legal sale of a used machine?
Nothing magical, but Amazon IS an authorized Apple reseller. If Amazon wants to continue to sell *new* Apple hardware, and Apple's reseller agreement says they can't sell refurbs, then they kinda have to play ball or else Apple will happily revoke their status and not ship new product to them.
Well with the www, we will always have access to old picts of old toys, so I doubt any kids are going to drool over these catalogs. Or will they?
They won't, because you had to have actually been there as a kid before video games to understand just how cool the Enterprise Bridge and Space:1999 Eagle playsets really were, along with all the Evel Knievel and SSP toys. You also had to have been there to understand the depth of envy you felt when your friend got one and you didn't.
For sure, but I suspect you can tell a bit about a surgeon's skill by looking at his stitches. If he takes the time to do it well and attends to the details, he probably extends at least that much attention to the more serious work. I just had foot surgery a couple of months ago, and was taken care of by one of the best podiatric surgeons in the state. His stitches were immaculate, and left very little scarring.
His "motivational" speech was something like this: "You guys make too much money, and this is going to change".
I've been on the receiving end of similar motivational speeches, and my response is usually, "You're right, things ARE going to change. Consider this my two week notice.", right there in the meeting in front of God and everyone. Not everyone is willing to do that, but I have a very low tolerance for bullshit.
If you're going to tell people you're going to screw them, don't expect them to just take it.
For patents, those just give a limited term monopoly on the right to profit off of an invention.
In the U.S., 35 USC 21(a) says, "Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent"
Patents don't just give the owner a monopoly right of profit - they also make it illegal to roll your own for your personal use. Whether you'd actually be prosecuted for it is a different question, but the patent holder would still have the right to shut you down if they found out. Example - suppose you make widgets, and a patented manufacturing process appears that can cut your production cost in half. Unless you get a license from the patent holder, you're not allowed to use that process, even if you do it entirely in-house and don't share with anyone.
Desktop computers were very rare in the early 1980s. They didn't really take off until the late 80s and early 90s.
Not disputing your facts about the obesity rates being notably tilted towards the poor nor your conclusions, but I worked at a ComputerLand in 1984-5 and saw tens of thousands of dollars' worth of XTs, ATs, Compaqs, Apple IIs, Macs (yeah, some people actually bought the 128K ones), printers, and other hardware go out the door each week, primarily to business customers in a relatively small metro area. Also saw plenty of the ATs come back until IBM got their drive issues worked out. Somewhere around here I still have some of the "stacked" RAM chips from the original ATs.
But it would have made VR *profitable*, which is the key thing. It's a lot easier to design for the consumer market when you already have a steady flow of money from the industrial/commercial market and aren't betting the company's survival on whether you sell enough for Christmas.
Of course, but saying "people got fat because they ate more" does nothing to explain WHY obesity suddenly skyrocketed with no significant change in availability or affordability of food, no significant change in opportunities for exercise, etc.
But there *was* a significant change in opportunities for exercise - computer/network usage became much more widespread during that time. All of a sudden, files were available without leaving one's desk to go find it in a file cabinet, and files could be easily sent between people without having to get up and walk across the office to bring a piece of paper in person. Printers got a lot cheaper and subsequently more common, so you didn't have to walk to the computer room to get your documents off the single expensive one the company had. It doesn't sound like a lot, but over time, all that inter-office activity could equate to a mile or more of walking every day that simply went away. Similar computer-related reductions in physical activity likely affected a broad spectrum of jobs. Even as a programmer, I can see that my own actvity level at the office declined between the mid-80's and mid-90's owing to technological advances.
Obviously that's not the sole cause of global chunkiness, but the point is that the obesity rate could very well be due to a lot of "obvious in hindsight" factors that have been overlooked up to this point.
Good point. I usually read at around 750 wpm or so, but that involves translation from the written language to a thought. Thinking to myself on its own is a lot faster because the thoughts are usually abstract/associative without the need to translate into words. It takes far longer for me to actually express a thought by writing/typing or speaking than the thought process itself does.
I know this will horrify some programmers but you can actually schedule multiple things to happen in a single program and create something that is simpler, easier to debug and easier to get to 99% working without an OS.
Want to horrify them even more? A lot of this stuff can be also done with purely analog electronics and electromechanical devices.
All your profile and data is stored locally (or wherever you want)
But a lot of that data will consist of links to other people's data, and be rather useless without it. For example, looking at the Solid docs, it looks like an instant messaging exchange would consist of your text, and links to the text that the other person responded with. If that person revokes your permissions, or their pod is simply unavailable for whatever reason, you now only have your side of the conversation to take to another service.
Where I work, that's a coding standard, and will get a hard fail in a code review if the variable is on the left side. Of course it's not bulletproof, like if you're comparing two variables, but it helps. Other standards, like requiring braces for even single-line if/thens help as well, at the occasional expense of readability.
My favorite is when the power goes out, and as you go to quickly get everything shut down before the UPS runs out of juice, and Windows decides THEN it wants to do an update.
Lots of people would pay $20/year to remove ads from Facebook and the friction would be minimal on a yearly subscription.
I wouldn't. Facebook has already shown itself to play fast and loose with users' privacy, and I couldn't trust that they wouldn't continue to try to monetize users' data even if a subscription fee had been paid. I don't think I'm alone in this assessment.
One day I had to pay my payroll two days before my own funds became available. So in order to pay my employees on time, I borrowed from the "middle man" money for 48 hours.
I'm not making a judgment either way, but in fairness to you, that situation represents two conflicting moral quandaries. On the one hand, you shouldn't borrow money without permission, but on the other, you shouldn't make a worker wait for his pay when they've already given you their labor.
If the generic version is not available for sale in the U.S., then that's a problem with the FDA approval for manufacturing the generic, not with a company jacking up prices.
The poster child for this is the drug colchicine, an anti-inflammatory used to treat active gout attacks. Colchicine (in its native form in the autumn crocus plant) was known to the ancient Greeks for the treatment of gout. For 3500 years, it had been used successfully in this capacity. It had been available as an isolated (and more effective) drug since the late 1800s. Until about 2009, it cost a few pennies per pill from any number of manufacturers. However, the FDA instituted the Unapproved Drug Initiative in 2006, and as colchicine was officially an unapproved drug, URL Pharma ponied up a little bit of cash to run trivial clinical tests that showed, "hey, this drug works for gout, subject to dosage guidelines and a few interactions that any competent doctor already knew about", just like we'd already known for literally millennia. For their efforts, URL Pharma was granted a patent on the thousands-of-years-old drug, resulting in a monopoly on the production and sale of colchicine as the brand name Colcrys, and per-pill costs went from a few pennies to $5.00. Generic colchicine has recently become available again as the patent expired in 2014, but since the FDA-approved formula is used under license from URL Pharma, prices from generic providers have only dropped to a few hundred percent more than when this fiasco started, down from the few *thousand* percent when Colcrys was the only available option. 15 years ago I could get a bottle of colchicine from any pharmacy for $2-3 instead of the $80 or so it costs today. I feel so much safer.
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What is so magical about a refurbished Mac that Amazon and Apple can legally collude to prevent the perfectly legal sale of a used machine?
Nothing magical, but Amazon IS an authorized Apple reseller. If Amazon wants to continue to sell *new* Apple hardware, and Apple's reseller agreement says they can't sell refurbs, then they kinda have to play ball or else Apple will happily revoke their status and not ship new product to them.
....the first clip released should be a chronological listing of Robert Tinney's cover paintings, each painting in one frame.
Well with the www, we will always have access to old picts of old toys, so I doubt any kids are going to drool over these catalogs. Or will they?
They won't, because you had to have actually been there as a kid before video games to understand just how cool the Enterprise Bridge and Space:1999 Eagle playsets really were, along with all the Evel Knievel and SSP toys. You also had to have been there to understand the depth of envy you felt when your friend got one and you didn't.
For sure, but I suspect you can tell a bit about a surgeon's skill by looking at his stitches. If he takes the time to do it well and attends to the details, he probably extends at least that much attention to the more serious work. I just had foot surgery a couple of months ago, and was taken care of by one of the best podiatric surgeons in the state. His stitches were immaculate, and left very little scarring.
His "motivational" speech was something like this: "You guys make too much money, and this is going to change".
I've been on the receiving end of similar motivational speeches, and my response is usually, "You're right, things ARE going to change. Consider this my two week notice.", right there in the meeting in front of God and everyone. Not everyone is willing to do that, but I have a very low tolerance for bullshit.
If you're going to tell people you're going to screw them, don't expect them to just take it.
For patents, those just give a limited term monopoly on the right to profit off of an invention.
In the U.S., 35 USC 21(a) says, "Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent"
Patents don't just give the owner a monopoly right of profit - they also make it illegal to roll your own for your personal use. Whether you'd actually be prosecuted for it is a different question, but the patent holder would still have the right to shut you down if they found out. Example - suppose you make widgets, and a patented manufacturing process appears that can cut your production cost in half. Unless you get a license from the patent holder, you're not allowed to use that process, even if you do it entirely in-house and don't share with anyone.
Desktop computers were very rare in the early 1980s. They didn't really take off until the late 80s and early 90s.
Not disputing your facts about the obesity rates being notably tilted towards the poor nor your conclusions, but I worked at a ComputerLand in 1984-5 and saw tens of thousands of dollars' worth of XTs, ATs, Compaqs, Apple IIs, Macs (yeah, some people actually bought the 128K ones), printers, and other hardware go out the door each week, primarily to business customers in a relatively small metro area. Also saw plenty of the ATs come back until IBM got their drive issues worked out. Somewhere around here I still have some of the "stacked" RAM chips from the original ATs.
But it would have made VR *profitable*, which is the key thing. It's a lot easier to design for the consumer market when you already have a steady flow of money from the industrial/commercial market and aren't betting the company's survival on whether you sell enough for Christmas.
Of course, but saying "people got fat because they ate more" does nothing to explain WHY obesity suddenly skyrocketed with no significant change in availability or affordability of food, no significant change in opportunities for exercise, etc.
But there *was* a significant change in opportunities for exercise - computer/network usage became much more widespread during that time. All of a sudden, files were available without leaving one's desk to go find it in a file cabinet, and files could be easily sent between people without having to get up and walk across the office to bring a piece of paper in person. Printers got a lot cheaper and subsequently more common, so you didn't have to walk to the computer room to get your documents off the single expensive one the company had. It doesn't sound like a lot, but over time, all that inter-office activity could equate to a mile or more of walking every day that simply went away. Similar computer-related reductions in physical activity likely affected a broad spectrum of jobs. Even as a programmer, I can see that my own actvity level at the office declined between the mid-80's and mid-90's owing to technological advances.
Obviously that's not the sole cause of global chunkiness, but the point is that the obesity rate could very well be due to a lot of "obvious in hindsight" factors that have been overlooked up to this point.
Meanwhile, I'm a theist, but otherwise could repeat this post verbatim. Let's go get a beer and talk about sciencey stuff.
I was actually agreeing with what you said, but hey, thanks for the nice words.
Good point. I usually read at around 750 wpm or so, but that involves translation from the written language to a thought. Thinking to myself on its own is a lot faster because the thoughts are usually abstract/associative without the need to translate into words. It takes far longer for me to actually express a thought by writing/typing or speaking than the thought process itself does.
I know this will horrify some programmers but you can actually schedule multiple things to happen in a single program and create something that is simpler, easier to debug and easier to get to 99% working without an OS.
Want to horrify them even more? A lot of this stuff can be also done with purely analog electronics and electromechanical devices.
They'll save $800,000, but your point is still valid.
All your profile and data is stored locally (or wherever you want)
But a lot of that data will consist of links to other people's data, and be rather useless without it. For example, looking at the Solid docs, it looks like an instant messaging exchange would consist of your text, and links to the text that the other person responded with. If that person revokes your permissions, or their pod is simply unavailable for whatever reason, you now only have your side of the conversation to take to another service.
Where I work, that's a coding standard, and will get a hard fail in a code review if the variable is on the left side. Of course it's not bulletproof, like if you're comparing two variables, but it helps. Other standards, like requiring braces for even single-line if/thens help as well, at the occasional expense of readability.
JACK may be awesome, but I don't think Avid and their competitors are quaking in their boots just yet.
I'd be happy to upgrade to 10 if there weren't so many spyware issues to deal with. Microsoft made their own bed with this version.
My favorite is when the power goes out, and as you go to quickly get everything shut down before the UPS runs out of juice, and Windows decides THEN it wants to do an update.
Don't forget, having the police show up to drag you off the plane is an extra-cost service that's also available.
Lots of people would pay $20/year to remove ads from Facebook and the friction would be minimal on a yearly subscription.
I wouldn't. Facebook has already shown itself to play fast and loose with users' privacy, and I couldn't trust that they wouldn't continue to try to monetize users' data even if a subscription fee had been paid. I don't think I'm alone in this assessment.
One day I had to pay my payroll two days before my own funds became available. So in order to pay my employees on time, I borrowed from the "middle man" money for 48 hours.
I'm not making a judgment either way, but in fairness to you, that situation represents two conflicting moral quandaries. On the one hand, you shouldn't borrow money without permission, but on the other, you shouldn't make a worker wait for his pay when they've already given you their labor.
The biggest issue is that the simple metal springs are not robust, being a scaled down version of the ubiquitous 1/4 inch plug and jack.
To be fair though, this is also a problem with every flavor of USB, and pretty much any non-locking connector type.
Or if you have to get men and equipment out there, and do it quickly enough so as to not give someone warning before your arrival.
If the generic version is not available for sale in the U.S., then that's a problem with the FDA approval for manufacturing the generic, not with a company jacking up prices.
The poster child for this is the drug colchicine, an anti-inflammatory used to treat active gout attacks. Colchicine (in its native form in the autumn crocus plant) was known to the ancient Greeks for the treatment of gout. For 3500 years, it had been used successfully in this capacity. It had been available as an isolated (and more effective) drug since the late 1800s. Until about 2009, it cost a few pennies per pill from any number of manufacturers. However, the FDA instituted the Unapproved Drug Initiative in 2006, and as colchicine was officially an unapproved drug, URL Pharma ponied up a little bit of cash to run trivial clinical tests that showed, "hey, this drug works for gout, subject to dosage guidelines and a few interactions that any competent doctor already knew about", just like we'd already known for literally millennia. For their efforts, URL Pharma was granted a patent on the thousands-of-years-old drug, resulting in a monopoly on the production and sale of colchicine as the brand name Colcrys, and per-pill costs went from a few pennies to $5.00. Generic colchicine has recently become available again as the patent expired in 2014, but since the FDA-approved formula is used under license from URL Pharma, prices from generic providers have only dropped to a few hundred percent more than when this fiasco started, down from the few *thousand* percent when Colcrys was the only available option. 15 years ago I could get a bottle of colchicine from any pharmacy for $2-3 instead of the $80 or so it costs today. I feel so much safer.