Who's this "they" who should help you upgrade? Bill Gates probably only has digital TVs in his house, so why should he pay more taxes just to be redistributed to you as vouchers? If the government enacted laws to reduce carbon emissions by banning certain vehicles, should they then also help you pay for a new car?
(Just testing if you're really a small-government kind of guy, or a just-big-enough-to-take-care-of-me government kind of guy.)
That's great in theory, but Constitutional Amendments are hard to enact by design, and even a minority can hold up crucially important reform for many, many years while victims suffer greatly. Article VII still says: "where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." It costs the State far more than $40 (the amount required to pay off both the plaintiff and the defendant) to assemble a jury!
In fact, the favorite Slashdot topic of copyright is an example. Apparently, Congress extending copyrights retroactively every twenty years would not violate the Constitutional wording of "limited times." This is contradictory to what a lot of people think copyrights are for, but it's not clearly wrong when you only look at the words on the paper.
I would be all for strict constructionism if the laws were actually comprehensive and very well written, but do look at the cases that will be overturned, and consider the quality of the legislature.
how many users just don't get the 'multi-application' usage concept because the flipping bar confuses them, so they close and flip between applications.
The 14th Amendment extended citizenship to Black males in 1867, but Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954. Clearly, laws don't just take real effect when they are signed. The country still did the "wrong thing" for nearly 90 years until judges ordered it to stop.
Determining the meaning of Privacy is also another good example of judges interpreting what isn't literally written.
The judges are there to interpret laws that were written by the people (directly through things like ballot measures, or indirectly through legislators), so in some manner he has to be able to know what the people really wanted and really wants. This doesn't mean the judge runs a court with an opinion poll, but "what the founding fathers intended" is certainly a big part of constitutional law, for example. In other times, the judge also must ignore what the people really wanted when the law was written (such as slavery and other civil rights violations) and do the right thing for the time.
Basically, is purpose is to eliminate format-shifting altogether, because that way they can charge independently for a song on CD, as a digital file for an iPod, as a digital file for a cellphone, as a ringtone, etc. etc.
That's not particularly true. Since you can burn an iTunes song onto a CD or rip a CD into iTunes trivially, the record labels can't possibly be stupid enough to expect too many people to buy both. As a ringtone, which is big business, they rely primarily on the greed of the cellular carriers to ensure that there's no way to get a ringtone onto the phone without paying. The carriers then force the manufacturers to cripple the phones.
So yes, they want to charge you four times for a song, but no, not through DRM... yet.
Trying to match that, I start with the 2.0 GHz MacBook, add the 160 GB drive, and I'm at $1,550. It matches the 1 GB RAM, has a smaller screen and a far less powerful video adaptor, but a faster CPU, a DL SuperDrive, Bluetooth, and a little camera. The Inspiron 6400 starts a $650, but a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo adds $210, 1 GB RAM adds $50, the 160 GB drive adds $125, the SuperDrive adds $40, Bluetooth adds $20, for a grand total of $1,134. So I'm still skeptical.
I just tried to configure the laptop as specified. A Compaq V3000Z with an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (there doesn't seem to be a ML-56), 14.1" BrightView screen, 1 GB of RAM, and a 80 GB hard disk costs $850, plus $70 in shipping. So I'm still skeptical.
Specs for my $600 laptop:
AMD Turion64 X2
1GB RAM
14" Brightview Widescreen
Nvidia Geforce Go 6200
100GB Hard Drive
Dual Layer DVD+R/-R Lightscribe Burner
The Dell Inspiron 1501 can be had for $689. It has:
AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology MK-36, which I think is single core
512 MB of RAM
60 GB hard drive
24X combo drive
ATI Radeon XPress 1150 256 MB video
WiFi, I think. Doesn't seem to have Bluetooth
...so as you can imagine, I'm a bit skeptical with your numbers. The version of Inspiron 1501 that sounds more like your $600 laptop sells for $899, a good 50% more than what you quoted.
The $2000 Macbook has a faster CPU and slightly larger HDD, but costs $1400 more than I paid.
What $2,000 MacBook? The most expensive default configuration seems to be $1,499.
it would seem to me that there is nothing illegal about this whatsoever (as long as you've purchased your copy of OS X, you should be able to do what you like with it).
IIRC, US Courts have ruled that installing software constitutes copying (from CD or DVD to hard disk), and violates copyright unless otherwise licensed. The license in question stipulates that you can only run MacOS X on Apple-branded hardware.
I don't think that's true, from a historical perspective.
The IBM PC architecture eventually took over the desktop because it was open, and because there was a common operating system that was compatible with IBM's PC-DOS. So, if Microsoft never existed, then either another company would supply MS-DOS to unify the IBM PC clones, or the clones would run an incompatible OS (unlikely), or the clones would not have existed at all. My guess is that the desktop computer market would be a lot more fragmented but also a lot more diverse, more like the days before the IBM PC. Just because Microsoft isn't there doesn't mean the Macintosh would've just inherited the world.
A somewhat off-topic correction: Windows Vista is about to limit what hardware you can run it on. Specifically, at least one low-end version is not licensed for use on virtual hardware.
Since you pointed to the Wiki page, you may then have noticed that "probabilistic causation" falls under "theories," not "logic," and probabilistic causation is far from the default when discussing a matter of law. As for logic, a woman not being able to lift heavy weights is neither "necessarily" nor "sufficiently" caused by her being a woman. The fact that other women can lift that weight is sufficient contradiction of the causality hypothesis.
Even by the relaxed standards of probabilistic causality, you may notice that the Wiki article calls it "notoriously difficult, expressed by the widely accepted statement 'correlation does not imply causation'." The observation that most women can't lift heavy weights is precisely only that: a correlation. "In statistics, it is generally accepted that observational studies (like counting cancer cases among smokers and among non-smokers and then comparing the two) can give hints, but can never establish cause and effect."
Causality means that if a condition is true, then another must be true as well. For example, if we assume that no woman can lift heavy weights, then if you are a woman you cannot lift heavy weights. The cause is your womanhood; the effect is your inability to lift heavy weights.
If you have to append a "(in general)" escape clause to your "causality", then it stops being one. This is because you are hiding the real causality (in this case, "(except for women who trained to lift heavy weights)") there. In fact, the causal relationship is between having trained to lift heavy weights with the actual ability to lift heavy weights.
Therefore, if you could actually establish causality, then you could argue for blanket discrimination. For example, in societies that do not allow men to perform full body searches on women, it is pointless to interview male candidates for the job.
What if google's statistical data (drawn from its database of performance reviews) shows that some ages, genders, races, and cultures are objectively better at a particular job than others?
The law does not assume that there's no relationship between job performance and age/race/etc. What the law assumes is that the relationship is not causal. That is, just because you're over 50 you can't do the job, even if most 50-year olds really can't. Therefore, we protect the one 50-year old who could from unfair discrimination.
The problem, I think, is that you can't create a really intelligent machine without giving it the ability to learn. If it can learn to any significant degree then eventually it's likely to be able to develop emotions, desires, protection from damage and destruction, etc.
What you have is at most a gut feeling, at most a correlation between intelligence and emotion among intelligent biological species. For example, consider Deep Blue, which is "intelligent" enough to defeat virtually every human being at chess. Not only is it unemotional, but part of its strength comes from being immune to the psychological powers of a Kasparov. If an expert system ever defeats human doctors at diagnosis, it would likely be in part because it has no ego, and is immune to any particular social status of the patient. If a robot surgeon would be better than a human one, it would likely be in part because it doesn't have a messy divorce pending.
But chess is a simple problem, you protest. Yes, it is, now that we know how to solve it with a simple machine, just as we have a machine that's intelligent enough to vacuum your floor with minimal oversight. Still no emotional requirement in sight. In fact, what we observe from history is a healthy string of more and more intelligent machines, none of which need emotion.
So where is this threshold of "really intelligent" that requires emotion? Being able to articulate that would change your stance from common conjecture into groundbreaking theory. I don't agree with you right now, but I would love to read that paper.
If I don't have kids should I pay for the education of the hillbilly who has 10?? Should I pay for the methadone clinic for some crack-head that hasn't contributed to society one day in his miserable life?
Your taxes pay for the privilege of not being mugged by the uneducated kid or crackhead, because the kid was educated with public money and the crackhead was sent to a public rehab clinic before that could happen. Sure, it's entirely unfair, but if you think you can just mind your own business, you're living in a "land of sunshine and rainbows" as well.
"Non-profit" just means that their institutional objective is not to maximize profits at the expense of all else. They have another objective that (theoretically) overrides the desire to make more money.
SUV drivers don't all waste gas (and all that stereotype), but they certainly make the roads less safe just by their very presence. If your bumper is not at the level to collide with my bumper, then one of us stands a good chance of driving over the other if an accident occurs. I'm not saying you don't have a right to use the road, just that our vehicles cannot safely share the road because they are designed to be incompatible.
an 18 wheeler stops a LOT slower than a regular car can, so the danger from tailgating them is minimized.
Tailgating an 18-wheeler also prevents you from seeing anything except the vehicle directly in front, which means that you lose the benefit of spotting an obstacle before the truck driver does. In fact, the truck might easily clear the obstacle because of its higher ground clearance, and it'll appear immediately in front of you with no warning. You also won't see if the truck is about to slam into a stopped truck in front of it. In other words, in many ways you are putting your life in the truck driver's hands.
Like another responder below wrote, it might be one of the safer forms of tailgating. But it's not one of the safer forms of driving. It's hard enough to pay attention to the road, especially on long highway drives, without taking out every margin off your personal response time.
Connection speed improvements have many side effects, one of which is how often and how much you browse. With a 56K metered connection, you basically dial up almost entirely to fetch email. With an "unlimited" dial-up connection, you begin to feel like browsing, but it's still a somewhat tedious experience. With broadband, you will more likely discover these applets, and actually be on-line to download them when you need them. Convenience has a threshold, and sometimes we cross those thresholds and it can be instructive to revisit old technologies to see if new life is breathed on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's this "they" who should help you upgrade? Bill Gates probably only has digital TVs in his house, so why should he pay more taxes just to be redistributed to you as vouchers? If the government enacted laws to reduce carbon emissions by banning certain vehicles, should they then also help you pay for a new car?
(Just testing if you're really a small-government kind of guy, or a just-big-enough-to-take-care-of-me government kind of guy.)
The real anti-Vista crowd wasn't planning to run Vista at all, so the RAM requirements will elicit little more than a chuckle.
That's great in theory, but Constitutional Amendments are hard to enact by design, and even a minority can hold up crucially important reform for many, many years while victims suffer greatly. Article VII still says: "where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." It costs the State far more than $40 (the amount required to pay off both the plaintiff and the defendant) to assemble a jury!
In fact, the favorite Slashdot topic of copyright is an example. Apparently, Congress extending copyrights retroactively every twenty years would not violate the Constitutional wording of "limited times." This is contradictory to what a lot of people think copyrights are for, but it's not clearly wrong when you only look at the words on the paper.
I would be all for strict constructionism if the laws were actually comprehensive and very well written, but do look at the cases that will be overturned, and consider the quality of the legislature.
Do tell us, how many?
The 14th Amendment extended citizenship to Black males in 1867, but Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954. Clearly, laws don't just take real effect when they are signed. The country still did the "wrong thing" for nearly 90 years until judges ordered it to stop.
Determining the meaning of Privacy is also another good example of judges interpreting what isn't literally written.
The judges are there to interpret laws that were written by the people (directly through things like ballot measures, or indirectly through legislators), so in some manner he has to be able to know what the people really wanted and really wants. This doesn't mean the judge runs a court with an opinion poll, but "what the founding fathers intended" is certainly a big part of constitutional law, for example. In other times, the judge also must ignore what the people really wanted when the law was written (such as slavery and other civil rights violations) and do the right thing for the time.
That's not particularly true. Since you can burn an iTunes song onto a CD or rip a CD into iTunes trivially, the record labels can't possibly be stupid enough to expect too many people to buy both. As a ringtone, which is big business, they rely primarily on the greed of the cellular carriers to ensure that there's no way to get a ringtone onto the phone without paying. The carriers then force the manufacturers to cripple the phones.
So yes, they want to charge you four times for a song, but no, not through DRM... yet.
Trying to match that, I start with the 2.0 GHz MacBook, add the 160 GB drive, and I'm at $1,550. It matches the 1 GB RAM, has a smaller screen and a far less powerful video adaptor, but a faster CPU, a DL SuperDrive, Bluetooth, and a little camera. The Inspiron 6400 starts a $650, but a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo adds $210, 1 GB RAM adds $50, the 160 GB drive adds $125, the SuperDrive adds $40, Bluetooth adds $20, for a grand total of $1,134. So I'm still skeptical.
I just tried to configure the laptop as specified. A Compaq V3000Z with an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (there doesn't seem to be a ML-56), 14.1" BrightView screen, 1 GB of RAM, and a 80 GB hard disk costs $850, plus $70 in shipping. So I'm still skeptical.
The Dell Inspiron 1501 can be had for $689. It has:
...so as you can imagine, I'm a bit skeptical with your numbers. The version of Inspiron 1501 that sounds more like your $600 laptop sells for $899, a good 50% more than what you quoted.
What $2,000 MacBook? The most expensive default configuration seems to be $1,499.
Which Mac costs $1,000 more than equivalent hardware?
IIRC, US Courts have ruled that installing software constitutes copying (from CD or DVD to hard disk), and violates copyright unless otherwise licensed. The license in question stipulates that you can only run MacOS X on Apple-branded hardware.
At which point you violate Apple's trademark instead.
I don't think that's true, from a historical perspective.
The IBM PC architecture eventually took over the desktop because it was open, and because there was a common operating system that was compatible with IBM's PC-DOS. So, if Microsoft never existed, then either another company would supply MS-DOS to unify the IBM PC clones, or the clones would run an incompatible OS (unlikely), or the clones would not have existed at all. My guess is that the desktop computer market would be a lot more fragmented but also a lot more diverse, more like the days before the IBM PC. Just because Microsoft isn't there doesn't mean the Macintosh would've just inherited the world.
A somewhat off-topic correction: Windows Vista is about to limit what hardware you can run it on. Specifically, at least one low-end version is not licensed for use on virtual hardware.
Since you pointed to the Wiki page, you may then have noticed that "probabilistic causation" falls under "theories," not "logic," and probabilistic causation is far from the default when discussing a matter of law. As for logic, a woman not being able to lift heavy weights is neither "necessarily" nor "sufficiently" caused by her being a woman. The fact that other women can lift that weight is sufficient contradiction of the causality hypothesis.
Even by the relaxed standards of probabilistic causality, you may notice that the Wiki article calls it "notoriously difficult, expressed by the widely accepted statement 'correlation does not imply causation'." The observation that most women can't lift heavy weights is precisely only that: a correlation. "In statistics, it is generally accepted that observational studies (like counting cancer cases among smokers and among non-smokers and then comparing the two) can give hints, but can never establish cause and effect."
Any more questions?
Causality means that if a condition is true, then another must be true as well. For example, if we assume that no woman can lift heavy weights, then if you are a woman you cannot lift heavy weights. The cause is your womanhood; the effect is your inability to lift heavy weights.
If you have to append a "(in general)" escape clause to your "causality", then it stops being one. This is because you are hiding the real causality (in this case, "(except for women who trained to lift heavy weights)") there. In fact, the causal relationship is between having trained to lift heavy weights with the actual ability to lift heavy weights.
Therefore, if you could actually establish causality, then you could argue for blanket discrimination. For example, in societies that do not allow men to perform full body searches on women, it is pointless to interview male candidates for the job.
The law does not assume that there's no relationship between job performance and age/race/etc. What the law assumes is that the relationship is not causal. That is, just because you're over 50 you can't do the job, even if most 50-year olds really can't. Therefore, we protect the one 50-year old who could from unfair discrimination.
What you have is at most a gut feeling, at most a correlation between intelligence and emotion among intelligent biological species. For example, consider Deep Blue, which is "intelligent" enough to defeat virtually every human being at chess. Not only is it unemotional, but part of its strength comes from being immune to the psychological powers of a Kasparov. If an expert system ever defeats human doctors at diagnosis, it would likely be in part because it has no ego, and is immune to any particular social status of the patient. If a robot surgeon would be better than a human one, it would likely be in part because it doesn't have a messy divorce pending.
But chess is a simple problem, you protest. Yes, it is, now that we know how to solve it with a simple machine, just as we have a machine that's intelligent enough to vacuum your floor with minimal oversight. Still no emotional requirement in sight. In fact, what we observe from history is a healthy string of more and more intelligent machines, none of which need emotion.
So where is this threshold of "really intelligent" that requires emotion? Being able to articulate that would change your stance from common conjecture into groundbreaking theory. I don't agree with you right now, but I would love to read that paper.
Look near the bottom of this page.
Your taxes pay for the privilege of not being mugged by the uneducated kid or crackhead, because the kid was educated with public money and the crackhead was sent to a public rehab clinic before that could happen. Sure, it's entirely unfair, but if you think you can just mind your own business, you're living in a "land of sunshine and rainbows" as well.
"Non-profit" just means that their institutional objective is not to maximize profits at the expense of all else. They have another objective that (theoretically) overrides the desire to make more money.
SUV drivers don't all waste gas (and all that stereotype), but they certainly make the roads less safe just by their very presence. If your bumper is not at the level to collide with my bumper, then one of us stands a good chance of driving over the other if an accident occurs. I'm not saying you don't have a right to use the road, just that our vehicles cannot safely share the road because they are designed to be incompatible.
Tailgating an 18-wheeler also prevents you from seeing anything except the vehicle directly in front, which means that you lose the benefit of spotting an obstacle before the truck driver does. In fact, the truck might easily clear the obstacle because of its higher ground clearance, and it'll appear immediately in front of you with no warning. You also won't see if the truck is about to slam into a stopped truck in front of it. In other words, in many ways you are putting your life in the truck driver's hands.
Like another responder below wrote, it might be one of the safer forms of tailgating. But it's not one of the safer forms of driving. It's hard enough to pay attention to the road, especially on long highway drives, without taking out every margin off your personal response time.
Connection speed improvements have many side effects, one of which is how often and how much you browse. With a 56K metered connection, you basically dial up almost entirely to fetch email. With an "unlimited" dial-up connection, you begin to feel like browsing, but it's still a somewhat tedious experience. With broadband, you will more likely discover these applets, and actually be on-line to download them when you need them. Convenience has a threshold, and sometimes we cross those thresholds and it can be instructive to revisit old technologies to see if new life is breathed on them.