I think you are arguing against your own point unless you can find a practical use for something beyond addition and multiplication. Nobody would argue against those. It's the advanced topics that are both much harder to learn and much less valuable in practice.
One step beyond what you said - spyware, Steam, etc. have pushed me away from PC gaming altogether, towards the console. I hesitate to say anything in favor of "trusted computing," but since cheating is such a problem in online games, and since open-source games seem to be practically a non-starter, I think it is best to simply have gaming on a separate, locked-down machine that has NOTHING to do with anything that matters - i.e. on a console.
Exactly. To find two simple but very different measures with such a correlation is very notable, regardless of whether BMI="fat" and IQ="smart". It would be just as interesting if a person's height were correlated to their income (which in fact it is).
CDDA is a very inefficient encoding. You could easily exceed CD quality with one quarter the bitrate using lossy compression if you started with a better-than-CD source. Is that what Howard Stern is planning to do? Almost certainly not. Does it even matter for his show? Absolutely not.
I think Palm made the mistake of standing still technologically.... Palm was somewhat stagnant, being pretty slow to offer high-res screens, color, audio and things like that.
That's one theory. But then, Palm had staked its reputation and built its business on usability over features. They credited their rise to targeting paper and pencil as their main competitor, instead of other PDAs. The iPod is similar in that respect. It is focused and has fewer features than most competitors, such as a radio, recording capabilities, and a cellphone. You may scoff at considering a cellphone a built-in feature for an mp3 player, but that's my point... the real "iPod killer" might not be a "fair" apples-to-apples shootout, but rather an onslaught of ubiquitous music players built into every cellphone, car stereo, and anything else with a processor and a headphone jack. Sometimes the only way to beat the champ is to change the rules.
On the one hand, I sympathize with your annoyance at outdated justifications for taxes. But again, do particular rationales for taxes really matter? I think what matters most is the total amount that government spends, and on what. Of second-highest importance is how much government takes in, and from whom (distribution of taxes). (I say taxes are less important than expenditures because once the money is spent, it *will* be collected one way or another, even if through a very diffuse mechanism like inflation). So, for instance, the debates over capital gains and estate taxes are significant because they affect the *distribution* of the tax burden. But let's say you repeal the rural electrification tax is repealed and income tax goes up a little. What difference does that make?
The free variable is release date. If they wanted, they could keep stockpiling them in warehouses until they had enough. I'm not saying they should, only that, yes, it is their choice how many to have on hand when they lauch.
So the bottom line is that governments have always been willing to redefine terms and just make stuff up when it helps generate tax revenue.
It's the government. If they want to tax it they can, unless they are voted out of office. The only thing I don't get is why try to rationalize the tax with this weird explanation? Why not just say "we need more tax revenue and are extending VAT to information services"?
Thanks, that helps, although unless I'm doing it wrong, editing the path that way destroys the filename itself.
I suppose it may be the GTK2 file browser. I think they are copying Windows. To me, having all these random location shortcuts everywhere (My Documents, Desktop, My Computer etc) obscures the simplicity of the directory structure as a tree and makes it confusing.
If we're starting a list of gripes, here's mine: I hate trying to save a download in Firefox.
First, I hate how it defaults to a fixed location (~/Desktop, which means nothing to my wm), and you have to press a button to "Browse for other folders." Next, I hate how there's no decent way to enter paths using the keyboard and tab completion in the dialog box. (Instead it shows the path as a row of buttons!?) I hate how some arbitrary bookmarks, "Home" and "Desktop", are placed above the nonstandard word "Filesystem" which refers to/, the root directory. Next, I hate how long it takes to populate the dialog for directories with many files - e.g. 15 seconds on a 2 GHz Core processor if you visit my/usr/bin which has 1300 files. Finally I hate the download manager which takes up half the screen and shows me all the old files I downloaded long ago.
Why, oh why, could they not just use some relatively normal file chooser dialog box?
Google has answered your ???? with "advertising." And it is working:
Google Inc.'s second-quarter profit seems likely to erase any lingering doubts about which Internet company rules the Web.
While rivals eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. merely matched analysts' earnings expectations, Google on Thursday soared well beyond Wall Street's financial hurdle - just like the online search engine leader has done in all but one quarter since it went public nearly two years ago.
"Google is clearly winning the battle," said Internet analyst Derek Brown of Pacific Growth Equities. "These are almost logic-defying results."
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company earned $721.1 million, or $2.33 per share, during the three months ended in June, more than doubling its net income of $342.8 million, or $1.19 per share, at the same time last year.
Excluding expenses for employee stock compensation and several other one-time items, Google said it earned $2.49 per share - well above the average estimate of $2.22 per share among 32 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.
Google's search engine has been hitting on all cylinders for so long that investors almost seem to take its high-powered performance for granted.
It marks the seventh time in eight quarters as a public company that Google has beat Wall Street's expectations, even though its management insists the search engine isn't being steered by investors' relentless push for higher profit.
Revenue for the period totaled $2.46 billion, a 77 percent increase from $1.38 billion a year ago.
Now you made me curious. My linux router is up 24/7 on a Comcast connection. Since august 6, I've had 57321 sshd connection attempts, right about 1000 per day. There were from 148 unique hosts. 20 of those hosts attempted over 1000 connections (none of which are mine), with 10259 attempts from the top host which is in Beijing.
Based on the above, the estimate of 1000 is surprisingly accurate.
Don't worry, we're fighting them over there so they can't attack us here. And by "them" I mean anybody, and by "over there" I mean everywhere but here, so basically we are covered.
As if any of this were relevant to music listening.
The simple truth is that the shuffle was an extremely lame product that was only created so Apple could cover the entire price range of mp3 players. Nobody else had the gall to sell a player with no display. "An experience in aural spontaneity..." pardon me while I barf. It was a simple matter of designing to a price. I won't question Apple on it because they've made more money from the iPod than I ever would have imagined. The folks who bought a Shuffle, on the other hand, I have to wonder about.
It's a Nielsen survey. They don't just pull up a list of screen names and count how many appear to be female. The data is collected through a questionaire. It's still possible that people lie (as with any survey), but since the survey is not directly connected to online personnas, there's no reason for somebody to lie on the questoinairre even if they do play as a female for extra attention.
The wireless technologies you mention could enhance rather than degrade security. Without connectivity, you have to carry all your information with you whever you go. That's dangerous. Having connectivity means you can access only what you need, when you need it, reducing the risk. Think of that VA laptop that got stolen with millions of SSN's. If the guy had just been using the laptop for remote desktop over VPN, no information would have been compromised.
How much water gets used up when you flush a toilet? That's right. None.
The question is how much potable water gets used up when you flush. Nobody's claiming there's a shortage of hydrogen and oxygen in the universe. That doesn't mean there's not a very real problem.
And how do you set up all those new hard drives? Do reinstall Windows from an official CD every time, then update 2 years' worth of patches, drivers, etc. etc. etc? If these new measures prevent using a system image, I'd think Windows would be a nonstarter for a data center (even more than it is now).
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I think you are arguing against your own point unless you can find a practical use for something beyond addition and multiplication. Nobody would argue against those. It's the advanced topics that are both much harder to learn and much less valuable in practice.
One step beyond what you said - spyware, Steam, etc. have pushed me away from PC gaming altogether, towards the console. I hesitate to say anything in favor of "trusted computing," but since cheating is such a problem in online games, and since open-source games seem to be practically a non-starter, I think it is best to simply have gaming on a separate, locked-down machine that has NOTHING to do with anything that matters - i.e. on a console.
Exactly. To find two simple but very different measures with such a correlation is very notable, regardless of whether BMI="fat" and IQ="smart". It would be just as interesting if a person's height were correlated to their income (which in fact it is).
CDDA is a very inefficient encoding. You could easily exceed CD quality with one quarter the bitrate using lossy compression if you started with a better-than-CD source. Is that what Howard Stern is planning to do? Almost certainly not. Does it even matter for his show? Absolutely not.
In other words, if MS is as unconcerned about "us" as you think they are, why did they bother implementing these changes?
Sure it's bad for customers, but will it really hurt Microsoft? People have a pretty high pain threshold for migrating away from MS.
On the one hand, I sympathize with your annoyance at outdated justifications for taxes. But again, do particular rationales for taxes really matter? I think what matters most is the total amount that government spends, and on what. Of second-highest importance is how much government takes in, and from whom (distribution of taxes). (I say taxes are less important than expenditures because once the money is spent, it *will* be collected one way or another, even if through a very diffuse mechanism like inflation). So, for instance, the debates over capital gains and estate taxes are significant because they affect the *distribution* of the tax burden. But let's say you repeal the rural electrification tax is repealed and income tax goes up a little. What difference does that make?
The free variable is release date. If they wanted, they could keep stockpiling them in warehouses until they had enough. I'm not saying they should, only that, yes, it is their choice how many to have on hand when they lauch.
I suppose it may be the GTK2 file browser. I think they are copying Windows. To me, having all these random location shortcuts everywhere (My Documents, Desktop, My Computer etc) obscures the simplicity of the directory structure as a tree and makes it confusing.
First, I hate how it defaults to a fixed location (~/Desktop, which means nothing to my wm), and you have to press a button to "Browse for other folders." Next, I hate how there's no decent way to enter paths using the keyboard and tab completion in the dialog box. (Instead it shows the path as a row of buttons!?) I hate how some arbitrary bookmarks, "Home" and "Desktop", are placed above the nonstandard word "Filesystem" which refers to /, the root directory. Next, I hate how long it takes to populate the dialog for directories with many files - e.g. 15 seconds on a 2 GHz Core processor if you visit my /usr/bin which has 1300 files. Finally I hate the download manager which takes up half the screen and shows me all the old files I downloaded long ago.
Why, oh why, could they not just use some relatively normal file chooser dialog box?
Based on the above, the estimate of 1000 is surprisingly accurate.
perl -e 'while(){next unless /sshd.*: Connection from (\S+) /; ++$ip{$1}; } map { print "$ip{$_} $_\n"} keys %ip; ' /var/log/messages | sort -n
Don't worry, we're fighting them over there so they can't attack us here. And by "them" I mean anybody, and by "over there" I mean everywhere but here, so basically we are covered.
The simple truth is that the shuffle was an extremely lame product that was only created so Apple could cover the entire price range of mp3 players. Nobody else had the gall to sell a player with no display. "An experience in aural spontaneity..." pardon me while I barf. It was a simple matter of designing to a price. I won't question Apple on it because they've made more money from the iPod than I ever would have imagined. The folks who bought a Shuffle, on the other hand, I have to wonder about.
It's a Nielsen survey. They don't just pull up a list of screen names and count how many appear to be female. The data is collected through a questionaire. It's still possible that people lie (as with any survey), but since the survey is not directly connected to online personnas, there's no reason for somebody to lie on the questoinairre even if they do play as a female for extra attention.
I meant VPN using two-factor authentication of course :)
The wireless technologies you mention could enhance rather than degrade security. Without connectivity, you have to carry all your information with you whever you go. That's dangerous. Having connectivity means you can access only what you need, when you need it, reducing the risk. Think of that VA laptop that got stolen with millions of SSN's. If the guy had just been using the laptop for remote desktop over VPN, no information would have been compromised.
Besides, a recipe isn't just ingredients, but also the process, which can be equally important. Think about wine: "Ingredients: grapes."
And how do you set up all those new hard drives? Do reinstall Windows from an official CD every time, then update 2 years' worth of patches, drivers, etc. etc. etc? If these new measures prevent using a system image, I'd think Windows would be a nonstarter for a data center (even more than it is now).
You seem to think all discussion must be about the preferences of the majority, but why?