After going back and reading the article, I see it's only for new contracts, and only for smartphones, so I wouldn't claim it is or should be illegal. But it's good for people to whinge about it online, that's how we become informed consumers.
What does bother me, though, is the lack of ala-carte alternatives. I wouldn't mind silly people entering into long contracts, taking out (what amounts to) high-interest loans for shiny gadgets, if I could just pick out my own smartphone, pay upfront, then buy minutes (or rather, megabytes) on my carrier of choice. But that choice does not exist. It's not like there's some vast, efficient marketplace out there ready to supply the service you want - except most everywhere in Europe.
If they didn't get you on the back end, they could just charge you more up front to buy the phone, then amortize the up front cost through lower monthly bills, until in the end you pay the same amount. That way, they could even offer "no termination fee!" But I'm sure somebody would still get pissed at call it deceptive business practices.
You just made that up. Why do you think it? Obscure down-the-road fees are deceptive; up-front charges are not. They're two different things. That's the whole point.
Warning - a lot of things look like they follow a power law.
There is a whole cottage industry of trying to fit power laws to data and being amazed whenever it fits. I guess I don't understand this one though; it sounds like they're just saying small attacks are more numerous than large attacks, which would seem obvious. What am I missing?
You'd be crazy to buy a PowerBook G4, it's not even supported by OSX any more. Cite:
Also, as of August 28, 2009, the PowerBook G4 stopped supporting the maximum version of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard (10.6) requires an Intel processor, which the PowerBook G4 does not have, meaning that Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) is the maximum version of Mac OS X that can be installed on the PowerBook G4 and all other Apple products using a qualifying G4 processor for Leopard.
I've got about a year on a T400 and it seems perfectly good to me. The LED backlight won't be fading anytime soon and the lid hinges are blocks of metal with no slop.
Was the T61 so different from the T60? I have an IBM T60p and it has the best screen I've ever seen in a laptop (great color, 1600x1200 res) and a nice keyboard. Several years old now and works fine. But I realized 15" screen is too big for me, and it runs too hot.
If it is that bullshit 1024x600 resolution as all the other netbooks, it's a 12" netbook. If they magically figured out a way to put a higher resolution display in one of these machines, it's "something I will actually buy"
Well get out your checkbook, because the first page of TFA says it's 1366x768 resolution.
My kids' computer was only 1024x768 until recently and I have to say, 1024 is no longer wide enough. 768 is only marginally tall enough, since some inconsiderate app developers are making simple dialog boxes taller than that.
I wouldn't doubt there's some of that in there, but should it bother me? All meat comes from the inside of an animal, which is not a place you would normally want to spend a lot of time. That's not to say all meat is equal in taste or texture, but ground beef is inherently what it is - pre-chewed bits of protein and fat. Is that gross? Who's to say, I'm made of protein and fat also. I think it's pretty incredible what you can get for a buck or two.
I agree, but on the other hand the next world war won't be 37M dead or even 60M, it will be billions. Nuclear war raises the stakes. It decreases the frequency of all-out conflict, but is it enough to offset the added cost of that conflict? It's an un-answered question; the fact that we've managed not to annihilate ourselves for a whole 60 years now isn't saying that much.
If you have never watched The Fog of War (Robert McNamara), you must. One of the things I learned was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was very nearly The End. It truly could have come out either way. So in a sense, the "expected value" of casualties due to the Cold War is about 40% of however many would have died. You can say it makes no sense to talk about probabilities in retrospect, but does winning Russian Roulette justify playing it in the first place?
Of course, none of this really matters unless somebody finds a way to "un-invent" nukes, which isn't happening anytime soon.
Take a problem that is all 64-bit integer math and has a branch every couple hundred instructions and GPUs will do for crap on it. However a supercomputer with general purpose CPUs will do as well on it as basically anything else.
That was always true of supercomputers. In fact the stuff that runs well on CUDA now is almost precisely the same stuff that ran well on Cray vector machines - the classic stereotype of "Supercomputer"! Thus I do not see your point. The best computer for any particular task will always be one specialized for that task, and thus compromised for other tasks.
rather an achievement, in between times the airframe and primary structure cracks and it falls out of the sky.
Well, at least you agree it is a novel aircraft. Though perhaps not quite as much as you think; warplanes have been using composites for some time now, so there is good reason to believe it will work. There was a bit of scandal a few years ago when Dan Rather made some very shaky accusations about the Boeing design. Admittedly there is inherently some risk whenever you take a step forward, but that's how we progress. Personally I'll be excited the first time I get to travel on one.
Yeah, I have very flat lithium polymer batteries for the expansion bays of my laptops. But the laptops' main batteries all seem to be lithium ion, and still seem to be made of cells. The Tesla Roadster uses lithium ion cells, too.
Most laptop battery packs still just contain cells, similar in form factor to C-cells. I don't think there are really that many different form factors of cells, it would be too much nuisance to manufacture. Most of the 1000s of battery variations, I believe, are just the packaging. Even if you take apart an electric razor, it's just AA or some other standard-sized cells. It's too bad laptop battery packs don't allow replacing cells, just like putting new D cells in your boom box.
I reckon it has at least as much to do with conscientiousness as with odds. Most people don't send in rebates, and I'm sure the same goes for warranties. Thus you might beat the odds if you're an anal person who keeps all the paperwork and still care for your older tech enough to fix instead of replacing it.
"Animals?" Come on now, if Taliban agents were caught handing out darknet cellphones and laptops through a mosque in NYC, you just know the same thing would happen. Heck, we recently arrested some midde-east looking people just for taking home videos at Disneyland.
I used to play "hardcore" flight sims (Falcon 4, Longbow 2, Apache vs Havoc, Red Baron 3d) and as far as I can tell, they did die. About 10 years ago there was a sudden glut of WWII titles, then the whole genre flamed out. Same for driving sims such as Grand Prix Legends.
That's probably because pills are effective, and counselling is not - despite being hugely expensive. Psychoanalysis has been practiced for 100 years and going, without any good evidence of efficacy. Just as having a positive mental attitude has been shown to have no measure effect on cancer outcomes.
This whole article is just a trick to get a rise out of people by spinning "promotional discounts for influential people" as "price gouging the powerless." So which is it really? I'd argue, it's all in the numbers; if they're picking out a small percentage of disadvantaged people for a high price, that is gouging. But if they're picking out a small percentage of opinion leaders for a low price, that is a discount. And I'm guessing it's the latter.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why a relatively free market works so well for food, water, shelter, clothing, and heat (all basic human needs that are a much higher priority to one's continued existence) but fails for healthcare.
OK, here are a few reasons that spring to mind:
1) Healthcare customers usually do not possess the expertise to make informed decisions for themselves.
2) Healthcare expenses are concentrated at the end of life, after you lose productive capacity to pay for them.
3) Healthcare expenses are extremely unpredictable, ranging from "none at all" to "more than you will earn in your lifetime."
4) No reasonably stable and weathy nation actually leaves food, water, shelter, clothing, and heat entirely to the free market; there is a safety net that supplies enough of each to survive. What the free market actually determines is how much luxury people are entitled to. (That is why the recent spike in unemployment hasn't been accompanied by mass starvation, and ensuing violent upheaval). This is sort of true even for health care in the US, since emergency rooms are compelled to provide lifesaving treatment. But it's a terribly expensive and ineffective way to go about it.
You speak as if searching anonymously were a simple matter of not logging in. The fact is, you have no real way of knowing where any given search engine may be following you. Between cookies, redirect links, ip address tracking through ads or other inline links on 3rd party sites, search content analysis (as with the "anonymized" searches leaked by AOL a few years back)... there is a real question whether anonymous web use is possible at all, a question which nobody can answer definitively since new analysis techniques are discovered all the time.
The registry alone makes Windows impossible to clean. Who knows what is in there? It's a bunch of gibberish. Please nobody claim it's the same as/etc, because it isn't. At best the registry is/etc's evil twin.
HTML doesn't offer sufficient control over layout. Subsequent to HTML 1.0 a sequence of band-aids (like css) have been designed to address the problem, at the cost of more and more complexity. Often publishers just want to specify the layout, not open it up to complex negotiation with the client.
Maybe we should re-phrase the question: "Russia, did you inadvertently put on a weird fireworks show the other night?"
After all, "launch" implies putting something into space. Going up a mile or two, spiralling around and around for a several minutes until the whole thing is obliterated, hardly qualifies.
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What does bother me, though, is the lack of ala-carte alternatives. I wouldn't mind silly people entering into long contracts, taking out (what amounts to) high-interest loans for shiny gadgets, if I could just pick out my own smartphone, pay upfront, then buy minutes (or rather, megabytes) on my carrier of choice. But that choice does not exist. It's not like there's some vast, efficient marketplace out there ready to supply the service you want - except most everywhere in Europe.
You just made that up. Why do you think it? Obscure down-the-road fees are deceptive; up-front charges are not. They're two different things. That's the whole point.
There is a whole cottage industry of trying to fit power laws to data and being amazed whenever it fits. I guess I don't understand this one though; it sounds like they're just saying small attacks are more numerous than large attacks, which would seem obvious. What am I missing?
Was the T61 so different from the T60? I have an IBM T60p and it has the best screen I've ever seen in a laptop (great color, 1600x1200 res) and a nice keyboard. Several years old now and works fine. But I realized 15" screen is too big for me, and it runs too hot.
Well get out your checkbook, because the first page of TFA says it's 1366x768 resolution.
My kids' computer was only 1024x768 until recently and I have to say, 1024 is no longer wide enough. 768 is only marginally tall enough, since some inconsiderate app developers are making simple dialog boxes taller than that.
I wouldn't doubt there's some of that in there, but should it bother me? All meat comes from the inside of an animal, which is not a place you would normally want to spend a lot of time. That's not to say all meat is equal in taste or texture, but ground beef is inherently what it is - pre-chewed bits of protein and fat. Is that gross? Who's to say, I'm made of protein and fat also. I think it's pretty incredible what you can get for a buck or two.
If you have never watched The Fog of War (Robert McNamara), you must. One of the things I learned was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was very nearly The End. It truly could have come out either way. So in a sense, the "expected value" of casualties due to the Cold War is about 40% of however many would have died. You can say it makes no sense to talk about probabilities in retrospect, but does winning Russian Roulette justify playing it in the first place?
Of course, none of this really matters unless somebody finds a way to "un-invent" nukes, which isn't happening anytime soon.
Can we please just officially define "n times less" as "1/n" and not feel bad about it anymore?
That was always true of supercomputers. In fact the stuff that runs well on CUDA now is almost precisely the same stuff that ran well on Cray vector machines - the classic stereotype of "Supercomputer"! Thus I do not see your point. The best computer for any particular task will always be one specialized for that task, and thus compromised for other tasks.
BTW, newer GPUs support double precision.
Well, at least you agree it is a novel aircraft. Though perhaps not quite as much as you think; warplanes have been using composites for some time now, so there is good reason to believe it will work. There was a bit of scandal a few years ago when Dan Rather made some very shaky accusations about the Boeing design. Admittedly there is inherently some risk whenever you take a step forward, but that's how we progress. Personally I'll be excited the first time I get to travel on one.
Yeah, I have very flat lithium polymer batteries for the expansion bays of my laptops. But the laptops' main batteries all seem to be lithium ion, and still seem to be made of cells. The Tesla Roadster uses lithium ion cells, too.
Most laptop battery packs still just contain cells, similar in form factor to C-cells. I don't think there are really that many different form factors of cells, it would be too much nuisance to manufacture. Most of the 1000s of battery variations, I believe, are just the packaging. Even if you take apart an electric razor, it's just AA or some other standard-sized cells. It's too bad laptop battery packs don't allow replacing cells, just like putting new D cells in your boom box.
I reckon it has at least as much to do with conscientiousness as with odds. Most people don't send in rebates, and I'm sure the same goes for warranties. Thus you might beat the odds if you're an anal person who keeps all the paperwork and still care for your older tech enough to fix instead of replacing it.
It really illustrates how easy it is to believe anything about your enemies once you regard them as "morally bankrupt animals."
"Animals?" Come on now, if Taliban agents were caught handing out darknet cellphones and laptops through a mosque in NYC, you just know the same thing would happen. Heck, we recently arrested some midde-east looking people just for taking home videos at Disneyland.
I used to play "hardcore" flight sims (Falcon 4, Longbow 2, Apache vs Havoc, Red Baron 3d) and as far as I can tell, they did die. About 10 years ago there was a sudden glut of WWII titles, then the whole genre flamed out. Same for driving sims such as Grand Prix Legends.
That's probably because pills are effective, and counselling is not - despite being hugely expensive. Psychoanalysis has been practiced for 100 years and going, without any good evidence of efficacy. Just as having a positive mental attitude has been shown to have no measure effect on cancer outcomes.
Maybe it's because well-to-do people are more averse to the stigma of mental illness in their family.
This whole article is just a trick to get a rise out of people by spinning "promotional discounts for influential people" as "price gouging the powerless." So which is it really? I'd argue, it's all in the numbers; if they're picking out a small percentage of disadvantaged people for a high price, that is gouging. But if they're picking out a small percentage of opinion leaders for a low price, that is a discount. And I'm guessing it's the latter.
OK, here are a few reasons that spring to mind:
1) Healthcare customers usually do not possess the expertise to make informed decisions for themselves.
2) Healthcare expenses are concentrated at the end of life, after you lose productive capacity to pay for them.
3) Healthcare expenses are extremely unpredictable, ranging from "none at all" to "more than you will earn in your lifetime."
4) No reasonably stable and weathy nation actually leaves food, water, shelter, clothing, and heat entirely to the free market; there is a safety net that supplies enough of each to survive. What the free market actually determines is how much luxury people are entitled to. (That is why the recent spike in unemployment hasn't been accompanied by mass starvation, and ensuing violent upheaval). This is sort of true even for health care in the US, since emergency rooms are compelled to provide lifesaving treatment. But it's a terribly expensive and ineffective way to go about it.
You speak as if searching anonymously were a simple matter of not logging in. The fact is, you have no real way of knowing where any given search engine may be following you. Between cookies, redirect links, ip address tracking through ads or other inline links on 3rd party sites, search content analysis (as with the "anonymized" searches leaked by AOL a few years back)... there is a real question whether anonymous web use is possible at all, a question which nobody can answer definitively since new analysis techniques are discovered all the time.
The registry alone makes Windows impossible to clean. Who knows what is in there? It's a bunch of gibberish. Please nobody claim it's the same as /etc, because it isn't. At best the registry is /etc's evil twin.
HTML doesn't offer sufficient control over layout. Subsequent to HTML 1.0 a sequence of band-aids (like css) have been designed to address the problem, at the cost of more and more complexity. Often publishers just want to specify the layout, not open it up to complex negotiation with the client.
Maybe we should re-phrase the question: "Russia, did you inadvertently put on a weird fireworks show the other night?" After all, "launch" implies putting something into space. Going up a mile or two, spiralling around and around for a several minutes until the whole thing is obliterated, hardly qualifies.