Tss, bullshit, the average american or european consume waaay more energy and resources than someone in china, why would they have to cut down the most?
And much of the energy used in China is used to manufacture goods for export - the things we consume too much off!
Say they would use flash if it could be made cheap enough. This would probably only let you write at 10MB/sec which means almost an hour to fill it up.
A disc, by comparison, is manufactured in seconds. Completely done.
The excessive cost of flash or PROM combined with the low write speed means it will likely not be used for that.
The only thing I could imagine is semiconductor media distribution where a whole wafer of ROM is produced with the movie pre-encoded on it. But that would likely still be prohibitively expensive for anything but the largest production runs.
15 months is still a long time and so when you do lose your job, you don't have to go "oh my god how will I feed my kids next? I'd better get a job, any job, now!". It still gives a lot of bargaining power. Plus industries regulate themselves - unions are still strong and people simply refuse to work for too little.
The same can be said of the other countries you mention. While there may not be a statutory minimum wage, there are other controls in place that make sure people get paid a fair amount.
The truth is that labor markets are too complex to make statements like "high minimum wage leads to unemployment and delinquency" when the truth is most EU countries have a higher minimum wage (twice as high, generally) and an unemployment rate only 17% higher than the US.
That is the point I was really trying to make and I did say "most countries" and not "all". Just because there are a handful of exceptions and extremes doesn't make my statement that most countries have higher minimum wages with no significantly higher unemployment and with lower delinquency rates any less true.
I did not know that. I guess the more sensible thing is that if you are an adult working minimum wage, it is way higher than in the US. Generally twice as high.
And remember most of these people have things like excellent health care paid for by the state's scheme (unlike, say, Wall-mart "associates") and better access to non-profit housing schemes.
All that makes it easier to make ends meet as well.
In Germany, the minimum wage for most people is unemployment benefits! There is no point in trying to pay someone less then what they would get for sitting at home. I have met people there that had been unemployed for years because they could not find work in their chosen profession. ("Wildlife manager" - talk about a niche!)
Read the parent, he made the comment that high minimum wage in the US would lead to higher youth unemployment and higher delinquency. I was merely debunking that claim.
Yeah and most "sensible" countries also have a 50-60% tax rate
You are quoting the top bracket, most people are not in that and actual tax rate is much lower. The interesting number is tax as percentage of GDP and the US is quite low, but not *that* much lower.
The evidence is in the fact that standards of living for the majority of people in those countries is higher and with fewer people below the poverty line.
It also pays for things like university education, health care, pensions and such that most people in the US have to shell out for themselves.
So there is a lot more to it that just saying that the taxes are too high - governments generally do use these to pay for things that benefit the tax payers. One could argue that as percentage of revenue the US is a lot more squandering than most other countries - in things like defense spending, especially the past few years!
Plus there is the issue of economies of scale - 300 million is a hell of a lot of tax payers!
It's not how much tax you pay - it's about how much value you get out of it. And on that count most high-tax european countries are doing quite well.
Minimum wage laws generally only result in layoffs and law-breaking. They also make it much more difficult for students and youth to find part-time and summer jobs, which not only deprives them of spending money and experience, but also seems to correlate with increased youth crime and delinquency.
And this experience is based on which time when there was a high minimum wage in the US? This is theory based on a complete lack of research and encourage by big companies crying poor.
Most sensible countries (i.e.: any "western" country apart from the US) have tiered minimum wages. So when you need a school kid to fill in on the weekend and cover vacation leave of your full timers, you can pay a low wage. But when you need reliable adults to work full-time jobs, you are going to have to pay adult wages.
Did I mention those countries all have lower youth delinquency rates than the US too? An I certainly never had any trouble finding work for spending money and experience as a kid! In fact, I don't know any kid who wanted a saturday or summer job that was unable to get one.
In any case, storing the password for online banking using crypt or anything else that can't be decoded has its drawbacks too. Right now, many UK banks use the scheme where they ask you only for "characters 1, 4, 5 and 7" of your password.
This is to foil key-loggers.
And I can't completely disagree; if crackers get into the login database to steal plain-text (or at least reversibly encrypted) passwords there is a bigger security issue...
Adjusted for inflation, that is over $600 now. You can certainly buy one now for that money that sounds better than yours, just don't expect a $25 K-Mart special or even a $100 Sony to do so.
If it works and sounds good, don't replace it. But if you must, rest assured that you can buy one that sounds as good or better.
And yes, most DVD players suck ass in the role of CD player.
A compressor makes the sound smaller, so you can transfer it faster. By adding a compressor to the line, he can handle a larger volume of calls.
This of course is only useful if he is paid per call. If he is paid for time spent on the phone, then he should get something that will convert everything into a WAV or AIFF file so it takes forever to come through.
There used to be a Dutch radio program in the 80s called "NOS Hobbyscoop" that had their own basic interpreter for many computers of the day. (MSX, Acorn, Sharp MZ, etc.)
They actually broadcast computer programs every week on medium wave AM. They'd count down, you start the cassette recorder and you had some new programs.
Fun for the whole family, even if a bit painful on the ears!
Uhm, in the long term, solar is cheaper than fossil fuels for producing electricity. And we won't run out of it. Seen oil and other fossil fuel prices lately? That is supply and demand for you and demand is going up and supply is down. And while people focus on oil prices only, coal prices have almost doubled in the past year too.
The poor will be suffering due to money spent on oil wars, not from money spent on renewable energy.
The *only* long term answer is wind and solar plus nuclear and geothermal for base-load power when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Your warranty is not voided by swapping easy to reach components yourself, Apple states so themselves and provide pretty pictures on how to do it.
Even on the Mac Mini, which is a pain to open, you do not void your warranty by doing so.
I upgraded my MBP from 2GB to after market 4GB (and used the 2x 1GB up upgrade the father in law's iMac) and saved.
On my Mac Pro, there isn't even a need to take anything out, so bought it with base 1GB/250GB and just stuck in more 3rd party RAM and disks, which Apple case design makes easier to do than any other vendor I know - they even print pretty pictures and diagrams inside the case on how to do it!
No, it won't - as long as the hardware is up to scratch.
There are three ways to implement SSL:
1. Let the server CPU do it. Nice for small sites with tons of spare CPU because those cycles were not used for anything else anyway. Way too many sites use this and it is what gives SSL its bad name for speed. (that and when it first came out, your local PC was slow at crypto as well, now it won't break into a sweat over it)
2. Crypto card. An PCI card that the web server can off-load SSL to. Not very many people use this.
3. External crypto box. Acts as a proxy and the real web server only sees non-SSL requests. This is the optimal solution for most sites, including TPB.
Now your PC is fast enough to decrypt this, forming no bottle neck in the transfer rate. As long as the crypto solution is implemented with putting any more strain on the existing web servers, the throughput will remain the same. (scp transfers between my servers are just as fast as FTP or HTTP)
The only thing that causes some slowdown is latency caused by the initial key-exchange between browser and server. But again, this is way more pronounced when using a normal CPU to do SSL. Optimized crypto boxes are much faster at creating keys.
So if you are still running Tiger on what sounds like all your computers, how do you know that Leopard is so bad? Did you upgrade to it, did not like it and then downgrade again?
Leopard has been rock solid for me. There were a few initial crashes that annoyed me but low and behold: it didn't take a Leopard update, but rather a Parallels update to make those go away. Leopard was fine all along.
That said: Snow Leopard sounds like a good plan. While performance of Leopard is better that 10.4 already, I don't get the feeling it is making the most of any of my Macs.
Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked. When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper. I disagree. Here's how to make paper safer than any machine will ever be:
Mark the paper with a pencil, put it in a box. All day long, party representatives are welcome to keep their eye on the boxes. At the end of the day, election officials do the counting, in the same place where to votes were cast so there is no possibility of switching in transit. The party representatives are there looking over their shoulder and doing their own count. If there is a dispute, there's an awful lot of witnesses.
Because the number of voters per precinct will be relatively low, the undisputed result will be known in a couple of hours at the most and because there were party representatives at every precinct, they know what the national total should add up to, so no chance for any shenanigans by the central authority there either.
This is how the Canadians do it, by the way. Nobody ever disputes an election in Canada.
No machine will ever beat that. The more sophisticated your encryption and tamper proofing, the more sophisticated the fraud - it's an arms race you can't win.
What? That's totally ridiculous. It means that the XO becomes nothing more than a vehicle for transfer of money from 3rd world children to Microsoft. Just like it is just another vehicle to transfer money from 3rd world kids to AMD!
Or did you think they got the chips at cost? Or the manufacturer assembled the machine at cost? Or that nobody at the foundation was paid for their time?
In an ideal world, MS would have given it for free I agree, but don't single them out for making money on the 3rd world in this way.
As a Mac (but not Apple, there is a difference!) fan-boy I am just surprised that they didn't take up Steve Jobs's offer for free OS X now that it has become clear they need a more mainstream OS to make it a success.
(translated) My rich parents can't get broadband in their summer home in Cape Cod because they're too pretentious to use a dish and the mean old phone company doesn't want to spend millions to run DSL out to bumblefuck. Mr. Senator, can you make the taxpayer foot the bill so my parents can have *broadband* in their *summer home*??? Where does the OP indicate this is their summer home? I would not be surprised if some people actually live their all year round. I don't know about new England, but in Old England, many older folks still live in their little old cottages and have done so all their lives, even though rich folk have snapped up most around them for use as weekend retreats.
Secondly, politicians can do more that spend money to pay for the infrastructure. Telcos require permission from the government to do all sorts of things and as a condition of putting in service to more profitable areas, they could be forced to service other areas as well. Everybody wins. Unless you think spending an extra 25c a month on your subscription to fund it is the slippery slope to socialism and before you know it we'll all be working for the state and need permission to visit a department store, of course.
You may be right, I don't know, but you should not jump to conclusions until you know all the facts.
Although I like OR-mapping frameworks, you don't need one to avoid SQL insertions. Plain old PreparedStatement in JDBC will do that job just fine also.
I think you and I are on the same page, but:
Between that and mentioning Windows, he is urging the project to be less open. Frankly, I don't care if it can run Windows. I'm all about choice and competition. I would say he is urging the project to give people more of what they want, regardless of openness.
Adobe makes money not on the flash player, but on the authoring tools. An open source player would allow someone to reverse engineer their own authoring tools making an open source player is unlikely. It would be nice if they made a build for the XO, though. It would be good PR.
Slashdot Mirror
Tss, bullshit, the average american or european consume waaay more energy and resources than someone in china, why would they have to cut down the most?
And much of the energy used in China is used to manufacture goods for export - the things we consume too much off!
Say they would use flash if it could be made cheap enough. This would probably only let you write at 10MB/sec which means almost an hour to fill it up.
A disc, by comparison, is manufactured in seconds. Completely done.
The excessive cost of flash or PROM combined with the low write speed means it will likely not be used for that.
The only thing I could imagine is semiconductor media distribution where a whole wafer of ROM is produced with the movie pre-encoded on it. But that would likely still be prohibitively expensive for anything but the largest production runs.
Not to mention virtually any photo on Facebook, has, well, recognizable faces in there, which is the point of the site.
I'd like to see them sell them as stock without a model release!
15 months is still a long time and so when you do lose your job, you don't have to go "oh my god how will I feed my kids next? I'd better get a job, any job, now!". It still gives a lot of bargaining power. Plus industries regulate themselves - unions are still strong and people simply refuse to work for too little.
The same can be said of the other countries you mention. While there may not be a statutory minimum wage, there are other controls in place that make sure people get paid a fair amount.
The truth is that labor markets are too complex to make statements like "high minimum wage leads to unemployment and delinquency" when the truth is most EU countries have a higher minimum wage (twice as high, generally) and an unemployment rate only 17% higher than the US.
That is the point I was really trying to make and I did say "most countries" and not "all". Just because there are a handful of exceptions and extremes doesn't make my statement that most countries have higher minimum wages with no significantly higher unemployment and with lower delinquency rates any less true.
That was the argument I was debunking.
If you call 17% (one percentage point) "much higher", then yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate
USA: 5.7%
EU: 6.7%
I did not know that. I guess the more sensible thing is that if you are an adult working minimum wage, it is way higher than in the US. Generally twice as high.
And remember most of these people have things like excellent health care paid for by the state's scheme (unlike, say, Wall-mart "associates") and better access to non-profit housing schemes.
All that makes it easier to make ends meet as well.
In Germany, the minimum wage for most people is unemployment benefits! There is no point in trying to pay someone less then what they would get for sitting at home. I have met people there that had been unemployed for years because they could not find work in their chosen profession. ("Wildlife manager" - talk about a niche!)
Read the parent, he made the comment that high minimum wage in the US would lead to higher youth unemployment and higher delinquency. I was merely debunking that claim.
Yeah and most "sensible" countries also have a 50-60% tax rate
You are quoting the top bracket, most people are not in that and actual tax rate is much lower. The interesting number is tax as percentage of GDP and the US is quite low, but not *that* much lower.
The evidence is in the fact that standards of living for the majority of people in those countries is higher and with fewer people below the poverty line.
It also pays for things like university education, health care, pensions and such that most people in the US have to shell out for themselves.
So there is a lot more to it that just saying that the taxes are too high - governments generally do use these to pay for things that benefit the tax payers. One could argue that as percentage of revenue the US is a lot more squandering than most other countries - in things like defense spending, especially the past few years!
Plus there is the issue of economies of scale - 300 million is a hell of a lot of tax payers!
It's not how much tax you pay - it's about how much value you get out of it. And on that count most high-tax european countries are doing quite well.
Minimum wage laws generally only result in layoffs and law-breaking. They also make it much more difficult for students and youth to find part-time and summer jobs, which not only deprives them of spending money and experience, but also seems to correlate with increased youth crime and delinquency.
And this experience is based on which time when there was a high minimum wage in the US? This is theory based on a complete lack of research and encourage by big companies crying poor.
Most sensible countries (i.e.: any "western" country apart from the US) have tiered minimum wages. So when you need a school kid to fill in on the weekend and cover vacation leave of your full timers, you can pay a low wage. But when you need reliable adults to work full-time jobs, you are going to have to pay adult wages.
Did I mention those countries all have lower youth delinquency rates than the US too? An I certainly never had any trouble finding work for spending money and experience as a kid! In fact, I don't know any kid who wanted a saturday or summer job that was unable to get one.
Well, this was a TELEPHONE banking password!
In any case, storing the password for online banking using crypt or anything else that can't be decoded has its drawbacks too. Right now, many UK banks use the scheme where they ask you only for "characters 1, 4, 5 and 7" of your password.
This is to foil key-loggers.
And I can't completely disagree; if crackers get into the login database to steal plain-text (or at least reversibly encrypted) passwords there is a bigger security issue...
Adjusted for inflation, that is over $600 now. You can certainly buy one now for that money that sounds better than yours, just don't expect a $25 K-Mart special or even a $100 Sony to do so.
If it works and sounds good, don't replace it. But if you must, rest assured that you can buy one that sounds as good or better.
And yes, most DVD players suck ass in the role of CD player.
A compressor makes the sound smaller, so you can transfer it faster. By adding a compressor to the line, he can handle a larger volume of calls.
This of course is only useful if he is paid per call. If he is paid for time spent on the phone, then he should get something that will convert everything into a WAV or AIFF file so it takes forever to come through.
Iceland generates 26.5 of its electricity from geothermal power.
And of course 73.4% is from hydro power, and only 0.1% from fossil fuels. (probably generators at very remote locations?)
So the only fuel they import is to power vehicles!
Now if only they could find a way to export electricity, they would be loaded beyond belief.
There used to be a Dutch radio program in the 80s called "NOS Hobbyscoop" that had their own basic interpreter for many computers of the day. (MSX, Acorn, Sharp MZ, etc.)
They actually broadcast computer programs every week on medium wave AM. They'd count down, you start the cassette recorder and you had some new programs.
Fun for the whole family, even if a bit painful on the ears!
Uhm, in the long term, solar is cheaper than fossil fuels for producing electricity. And we won't run out of it. Seen oil and other fossil fuel prices lately? That is supply and demand for you and demand is going up and supply is down. And while people focus on oil prices only, coal prices have almost doubled in the past year too.
The poor will be suffering due to money spent on oil wars, not from money spent on renewable energy.
The *only* long term answer is wind and solar plus nuclear and geothermal for base-load power when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Your warranty is not voided by swapping easy to reach components yourself, Apple states so themselves and provide pretty pictures on how to do it.
Even on the Mac Mini, which is a pain to open, you do not void your warranty by doing so.
I upgraded my MBP from 2GB to after market 4GB (and used the 2x 1GB up upgrade the father in law's iMac) and saved.
On my Mac Pro, there isn't even a need to take anything out, so bought it with base 1GB/250GB and just stuck in more 3rd party RAM and disks, which Apple case design makes easier to do than any other vendor I know - they even print pretty pictures and diagrams inside the case on how to do it!
No, it won't - as long as the hardware is up to scratch.
There are three ways to implement SSL:
1. Let the server CPU do it. Nice for small sites with tons of spare CPU because those cycles were not used for anything else anyway. Way too many sites use this and it is what gives SSL its bad name for speed. (that and when it first came out, your local PC was slow at crypto as well, now it won't break into a sweat over it)
2. Crypto card. An PCI card that the web server can off-load SSL to. Not very many people use this.
3. External crypto box. Acts as a proxy and the real web server only sees non-SSL requests. This is the optimal solution for most sites, including TPB.
Now your PC is fast enough to decrypt this, forming no bottle neck in the transfer rate. As long as the crypto solution is implemented with putting any more strain on the existing web servers, the throughput will remain the same. (scp transfers between my servers are just as fast as FTP or HTTP)
The only thing that causes some slowdown is latency caused by the initial key-exchange between browser and server. But again, this is way more pronounced when using a normal CPU to do SSL. Optimized crypto boxes are much faster at creating keys.
So if you are still running Tiger on what sounds like all your computers, how do you know that Leopard is so bad? Did you upgrade to it, did not like it and then downgrade again?
Leopard has been rock solid for me. There were a few initial crashes that annoyed me but low and behold: it didn't take a Leopard update, but rather a Parallels update to make those go away. Leopard was fine all along.
That said: Snow Leopard sounds like a good plan. While performance of Leopard is better that 10.4 already, I don't get the feeling it is making the most of any of my Macs.
I would assume that if you get the bible questions wrong, you actually get a higher IQ score.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper. I disagree. Here's how to make paper safer than any machine will ever be:
Mark the paper with a pencil, put it in a box. All day long, party representatives are welcome to keep their eye on the boxes. At the end of the day, election officials do the counting, in the same place where to votes were cast so there is no possibility of switching in transit. The party representatives are there looking over their shoulder and doing their own count. If there is a dispute, there's an awful lot of witnesses.
Because the number of voters per precinct will be relatively low, the undisputed result will be known in a couple of hours at the most and because there were party representatives at every precinct, they know what the national total should add up to, so no chance for any shenanigans by the central authority there either.
This is how the Canadians do it, by the way. Nobody ever disputes an election in Canada.
No machine will ever beat that. The more sophisticated your encryption and tamper proofing, the more sophisticated the fraud - it's an arms race you can't win.
Or did you think they got the chips at cost? Or the manufacturer assembled the machine at cost? Or that nobody at the foundation was paid for their time?
In an ideal world, MS would have given it for free I agree, but don't single them out for making money on the 3rd world in this way.
As a Mac (but not Apple, there is a difference!) fan-boy I am just surprised that they didn't take up Steve Jobs's offer for free OS X now that it has become clear they need a more mainstream OS to make it a success.
Secondly, politicians can do more that spend money to pay for the infrastructure. Telcos require permission from the government to do all sorts of things and as a condition of putting in service to more profitable areas, they could be forced to service other areas as well. Everybody wins. Unless you think spending an extra 25c a month on your subscription to fund it is the slippery slope to socialism and before you know it we'll all be working for the state and need permission to visit a department store, of course.
You may be right, I don't know, but you should not jump to conclusions until you know all the facts.
Although I like OR-mapping frameworks, you don't need one to avoid SQL insertions. Plain old PreparedStatement in JDBC will do that job just fine also.
Can you please quote your sources? Apple sold well over 8M Macs in the last year, that's a whole lot of sales to beat.
I'd also like to see how many of those "Linux Laptops" actually end up running Linux. I have seen more than a few Eee PCs running Windows...
Adobe makes money not on the flash player, but on the authoring tools. An open source player would allow someone to reverse engineer their own authoring tools making an open source player is unlikely. It would be nice if they made a build for the XO, though. It would be good PR.