There is a case to be made for asking small children not to pick up the phone when they are home alone and do not recognize the number. Thieves place calls to check if the house is empty or lacking adults, for example. But overall, phone is a much more selective and limited communication facility compared to Internet. Dialing numbers randomly is liable to be very slow, and some callees might complain to police. It's much harder for a 40 year old man to pretend to be a 5 year old girl.
You honestly don't see how a 5 year old kid can be manipulated into giving away dad's credit card, convinced to meet a new online "friend" in real life or seriously disturbed by watching real life murder videos? We are not talking about teenagers here.
I am not the one who came up with the swimming pool analogy. Imaging your kids play in garden with a billion of other kids, adults, pedophiles and robots passing around pr0n ads, observed only by a deaf security guard who makes sure they don't physically harm one another during play time. I think your play time might have been a bit different back in the days, and your parents had some idea where you were and who you were playing with.
Children have parents coming to swimming pool with them. Imagine sending a 5 year old to swim by him/herself and not checking back for 3 hours. Now why would you do the same with an online (or just violent) game or Internet browsing/chat/so on session?
Now the situation would be reversed for a 16 year old teenager. He/she is expected to live independently in just two years, so supervision (on Internet or in the swimming pool) should only happen on voluntary discussion basis of if there is a reason to suspect problems.
Not all nuclear-capable countries have enough nukes to obliterate United States or ability to launch their arsenal all at once. If there are a dozen nukes flying your way, it sure makes sense to obliterate the offender now and then so that you don't have to fight the war with most of your military targets destroyed and much of your population dead and sick.
On the other hand, if another major nuclear power starts attacking, it makes sense to destroy at least their remaining launch facilities to stop the attack before all the nukes are launched.
The reason that there are no space based nukes is that everything that goes up eventually comes down. Besides contamination of a large area with (more poisonous than radioactive) uranium and plutonium, one has to wonder just want beryllium and plutonium are going to do in extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry.
Why should I live in pain if there are effective drugs to manage the condition? I will do the chemo and then take enough morphine and ecstasy to be pain free and happy.
I don't need a super powerful process or a 2 terabyte hard drive on a laptop. With Wi-Max type connectivity, I can always connect to my desktop or to a leased server for extra storage and computing capacity. What I need is for the laptop to work, that is not run out of battery. I don't know why I would need to wait 7 years either, as a 24 hour battery life is quite achievable with today's technology. Create a Macbook Air type laptop, except make it sicker by adding a fat, full size regular lithium battery on the bottom. Add a second, slower Via processor to the motherboard and make it take over when I am just browsing the web and writing e-mails. Make a reflective dish that concentrates light into a fiber optic cable and let me connect it to screen and shutdown the battery-consuming backlight.
I got a used iBook clamshell and upgraded it to a modern battery. It gets 8 hours of battery life now. I don't see why a laptop made 20 years later can not do as much.
Complicated standards result in complicated libraries. If I just want to find all occurrences of a word in a document, I shouldn't have to learn and link with a 100MB library.
XML requires a parser and locks out people using UNIX tools like sed, awk and grep. Neither can people write an ANSI C program with some scanf and printf statements. Also, with multiple levels of formatting and layout, it is no longer obvious just how to get all the plain text out in correct semantic order. XML has problems for sophisticated tools as well. Given a 1000x1000 spreadsheet, just try to write a query tools that quickly returns a single cell. But in any case, documents released by a government to its citizens should be processable with pretty much any tool to enable even hobbyists to help keep their government honest.
But if OOXML passes, customers, small to medium businesses and even world's governments are going to suffer. It's impossible for a team of 10 developers to implement a 1000+ page specification in their product. And because of ambiguities in the same, citizens will not be able to understand laws or government budgets of their own land.
The only thing is, 500 pages of ODF spec may not be much better for small businesses. What we need is a specification with multiple levels of fallback for simplier generators and consumers. For example, one part of a document zip file can be plain text contained in the document, with reasonable efforts to convert document structure to a human and machine readable plain text representation. For producers, it will be valid to generate a document bundle with only the text file and nothing else.
I configured a Dell Inspiron laptop and a MacBook Pro with nearly identical specs (the Dell had a better video card and a higher screen resolution)
How exactly did you manage that? Inspirons only come with Intel integrated memory and the highest screen resolution is identical to Apple's. As others mentioned, you don't get metal case or backlighted keyboard. Perhaps you should try to configure Macbook non-Pro and Inspiron with the same specs and see the prices again.
I would ask, but I haven't heard of any victims of child pornography. I did read some news about victims of child exploitation. Invariably, they would never be found and rescued if the images documenting their abuse were not published on Internet. Perhaps we should focus on stopping the crimes instead of censoring the evidence? I am sure some people enjoyed viewing Abu Ghraib photos, but it's doubtful that the abuse would have been stopped as quickly if they were not publicly disseminated.
I won't argue that there are better ways to improve our society than foreign wars and warrantless wiretaps, but I fail to see how fighting poverty and uneducation would change the number of shootings and bombings. Most of the most recent, high-profile shooting incidents involved college students.
Are you under impression that each shooting in a ghetto is as well publicized as those among rich guys or that most of the most recent high and low profile shooting incidents combined involved college students?
What is so patriotic about passing laws that will eventually put US companies out of business in the era of hosted applications while terrorists will simply move their sites abroad?
Although I sympasize with your predicament, are you sure you end up really being safer rather than just feeling safer? In the dark, the criminal may have trouble determining that you are a man or a woman, let alone weather you are armed or of an athletic build. On the other hand, even lighted streets usually have a plenty of shaded spots, trees and so on. A criminal hiding there will see you very well, while you will be blinded by street lights and lulled into a false sense of security.
Firefox shouldn't come bundled with any Google software, set home page to Google without giving a choice of other search providers or popup "set me as a default browser dialog?" unless the user explicitly goes to preferences menu and does so. I do hope Safari doesn't automatically hijack the default browser when it is installed in this manner. I don't see a big security downside to installing it if it needs to be explicitly run by the user rather than automatically activated from a web link.
What exactly are you getting for your $40K/per year. A computer capable of running any programming language compiler or simulation costs $1K, 10 textbooks that you can conceivable cover in a year are at most another $1K. A lady proficient at programming but currently staying at home with her 2 kids is babysitting my daughter for $40 day. If I needed to learn programming, I am sure she would be happy to teach me 1-on-1 for 3 hours/weekday for about the same money. The rest is just branding. Sure it's worth something at a job interview, but is it worth $320K that you will end up paying for your loan rather than buying a nice house cash down in many places in US?
Would be to work for a few years BEFORE college, save the money and THEN apply for an ivy league school. I guess these days it's hard to get a job without any degree at all unless you have a friend at a small company. However a programming degree can be easily obtained at a state university for very little money for state residents or even at a community college. Any job you get after that will likely pay way more than $30 per year.
While in college, remember to take a basic history class and understand how a pesky amendment to US constitution prohibits Google from forcing you to work for then in exchange for a scholarship.
Ok, I'll bite. Please let me know of some good games that run on MacOSX, have a playable demo and can be fully purchased and downloaded online. To be more specific, I need to install them on 3 Macs - my desktop, my notebook and my wife's notebook. If I get another machine later or reinstall the OS, I don't want to pay for another license or be locked out if the vendor goes out of business. I will gladly pay $80 for a game that keeps me entertained for a couple of months. Where do I go besides DOSBOXable abandonware archives?
Find out why the piracy happens in the first place. Most PC users will not think much of spending $20 for a reasonably entertaining game or $50 for a great one. What went wrong? Lack of being able to complete the purchase 100% online? No substantial demo to help one evaluate if the game is worth buying or works on a particular computer? Need for "$2 per level pricing" so that people who loose interest do not hesitate to buy the next game? Lack of differential pricing for developing countries.
Most restaurants do not have problem with patrons running off without paying the bill. Game/general software industry needs to figure out how they encourage the behaviour that hurts them.
So LEDS are a double edged sword for the lighting industry, on the one hand they're the best of the best for the environment, but on the other hand there is no turnover of bulbs. you'll be giving the LED bulbs to your grandkids before they have to replace them...
That's nothing. Furniture, screwdrivers, silverware, toys, pottery or refrigerator magnets can last hundreds of years with due care. We are finding artifacts of some of these kinds from ancient egyptians. And yet sales are going strong.
People will break the light bulb and buy new fixtures no matter what. There will always be a market in millions of units per year worldwide, enough for at least a couple of companies to justify investment in infrastructure. If existing companies do not deal with a change, there is plenty of incentive for a startup that only manufactures LEDs.
It's also worth mentioning that the bill actually restricts CIA, independent contractors and so on to the interrogation rules used by US military, which do not include waterboarding.
ACLU's position is that private procession of some kinds of arms, such as bazookas, torpedoes, SCUD missiles and nuclear weapons is going to have to be regulated no matter when constitution says to prevent complete annihilation of our civilization. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine resisting a military force backed by corrupt federal government without some of these weapons. Therefore, it's unreasonable to oppose every gun control law.
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There is a case to be made for asking small children not to pick up the phone when they are home alone and do not recognize the number. Thieves place calls to check if the house is empty or lacking adults, for example. But overall, phone is a much more selective and limited communication facility compared to Internet. Dialing numbers randomly is liable to be very slow, and some callees might complain to police. It's much harder for a 40 year old man to pretend to be a 5 year old girl.
Why would I go through so much trouble if I can just lock the frigging computer?
You honestly don't see how a 5 year old kid can be manipulated into giving away dad's credit card, convinced to meet a new online "friend" in real life or seriously disturbed by watching real life murder videos? We are not talking about teenagers here.
I am not the one who came up with the swimming pool analogy. Imaging your kids play in garden with a billion of other kids, adults, pedophiles and robots passing around pr0n ads, observed only by a deaf security guard who makes sure they don't physically harm one another during play time. I think your play time might have been a bit different back in the days, and your parents had some idea where you were and who you were playing with.
Children have parents coming to swimming pool with them. Imagine sending a 5 year old to swim by him/herself and not checking back for 3 hours. Now why would you do the same with an online (or just violent) game or Internet browsing/chat/so on session?
Now the situation would be reversed for a 16 year old teenager. He/she is expected to live independently in just two years, so supervision (on Internet or in the swimming pool) should only happen on voluntary discussion basis of if there is a reason to suspect problems.
Not all nuclear-capable countries have enough nukes to obliterate United States or ability to launch their arsenal all at once. If there are a dozen nukes flying your way, it sure makes sense to obliterate the offender now and then so that you don't have to fight the war with most of your military targets destroyed and much of your population dead and sick.
On the other hand, if another major nuclear power starts attacking, it makes sense to destroy at least their remaining launch facilities to stop the attack before all the nukes are launched.
The reason that there are no space based nukes is that everything that goes up eventually comes down. Besides contamination of a large area with (more poisonous than radioactive) uranium and plutonium, one has to wonder just want beryllium and plutonium are going to do in extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry.
Why should I live in pain if there are effective drugs to manage the condition? I will do the chemo and then take enough morphine and ecstasy to be pain free and happy.
I don't need a super powerful process or a 2 terabyte hard drive on a laptop. With Wi-Max type connectivity, I can always connect to my desktop or to a leased server for extra storage and computing capacity. What I need is for the laptop to work, that is not run out of battery. I don't know why I would need to wait 7 years either, as a 24 hour battery life is quite achievable with today's technology. Create a Macbook Air type laptop, except make it sicker by adding a fat, full size regular lithium battery on the bottom. Add a second, slower Via processor to the motherboard and make it take over when I am just browsing the web and writing e-mails. Make a reflective dish that concentrates light into a fiber optic cable and let me connect it to screen and shutdown the battery-consuming backlight.
I got a used iBook clamshell and upgraded it to a modern battery. It gets 8 hours of battery life now. I don't see why a laptop made 20 years later can not do as much.
Complicated standards result in complicated libraries. If I just want to find all occurrences of a word in a document, I shouldn't have to learn and link with a 100MB library.
XML requires a parser and locks out people using UNIX tools like sed, awk and grep. Neither can people write an ANSI C program with some scanf and printf statements. Also, with multiple levels of formatting and layout, it is no longer obvious just how to get all the plain text out in correct semantic order. XML has problems for sophisticated tools as well. Given a 1000x1000 spreadsheet, just try to write a query tools that quickly returns a single cell. But in any case, documents released by a government to its citizens should be processable with pretty much any tool to enable even hobbyists to help keep their government honest.
But if OOXML passes, customers, small to medium businesses and even world's governments are going to suffer. It's impossible for a team of 10 developers to implement a 1000+ page specification in their product. And because of ambiguities in the same, citizens will not be able to understand laws or government budgets of their own land.
The only thing is, 500 pages of ODF spec may not be much better for small businesses. What we need is a specification with multiple levels of fallback for simplier generators and consumers. For example, one part of a document zip file can be plain text contained in the document, with reasonable efforts to convert document structure to a human and machine readable plain text representation. For producers, it will be valid to generate a document bundle with only the text file and nothing else.
I configured a Dell Inspiron laptop and a MacBook Pro with nearly identical specs (the Dell had a better video card and a higher screen resolution)
How exactly did you manage that? Inspirons only come with Intel integrated memory and the highest screen resolution is identical to Apple's. As others mentioned, you don't get metal case or backlighted keyboard. Perhaps you should try to configure Macbook non-Pro and Inspiron with the same specs and see the prices again.
I would ask, but I haven't heard of any victims of child pornography. I did read some news about victims of child exploitation. Invariably, they would never be found and rescued if the images documenting their abuse were not published on Internet. Perhaps we should focus on stopping the crimes instead of censoring the evidence? I am sure some people enjoyed viewing Abu Ghraib photos, but it's doubtful that the abuse would have been stopped as quickly if they were not publicly disseminated.
I won't argue that there are better ways to improve our society than foreign wars and warrantless wiretaps, but I fail to see how fighting poverty and uneducation would change the number of shootings and bombings. Most of the most recent, high-profile shooting incidents involved college students.
Are you under impression that each shooting in a ghetto is as well publicized as those among rich guys or that most of the most recent high and low profile shooting incidents combined involved college students?
What is so patriotic about passing laws that will eventually put US companies out of business in the era of hosted applications while terrorists will simply move their sites abroad?
Although I sympasize with your predicament, are you sure you end up really being safer rather than just feeling safer? In the dark, the criminal may have trouble determining that you are a man or a woman, let alone weather you are armed or of an athletic build. On the other hand, even lighted streets usually have a plenty of shaded spots, trees and so on. A criminal hiding there will see you very well, while you will be blinded by street lights and lulled into a false sense of security.
Firefox shouldn't come bundled with any Google software, set home page to Google without giving a choice of other search providers or popup "set me as a default browser dialog?" unless the user explicitly goes to preferences menu and does so. I do hope Safari doesn't automatically hijack the default browser when it is installed in this manner. I don't see a big security downside to installing it if it needs to be explicitly run by the user rather than automatically activated from a web link.
What exactly are you getting for your $40K/per year. A computer capable of running any programming language compiler or simulation costs $1K, 10 textbooks that you can conceivable cover in a year are at most another $1K. A lady proficient at programming but currently staying at home with her 2 kids is babysitting my daughter for $40 day. If I needed to learn programming, I am sure she would be happy to teach me 1-on-1 for 3 hours/weekday for about the same money. The rest is just branding. Sure it's worth something at a job interview, but is it worth $320K that you will end up paying for your loan rather than buying a nice house cash down in many places in US?
Would be to work for a few years BEFORE college, save the money and THEN apply for an ivy league school. I guess these days it's hard to get a job without any degree at all unless you have a friend at a small company. However a programming degree can be easily obtained at a state university for very little money for state residents or even at a community college. Any job you get after that will likely pay way more than $30 per year.
While in college, remember to take a basic history class and understand how a pesky amendment to US constitution prohibits Google from forcing you to work for then in exchange for a scholarship.
Ok, I'll bite. Please let me know of some good games that run on MacOSX, have a playable demo and can be fully purchased and downloaded online. To be more specific, I need to install them on 3 Macs - my desktop, my notebook and my wife's notebook. If I get another machine later or reinstall the OS, I don't want to pay for another license or be locked out if the vendor goes out of business. I will gladly pay $80 for a game that keeps me entertained for a couple of months. Where do I go besides DOSBOXable abandonware archives?
Find out why the piracy happens in the first place. Most PC users will not think much of spending $20 for a reasonably entertaining game or $50 for a great one. What went wrong? Lack of being able to complete the purchase 100% online? No substantial demo to help one evaluate if the game is worth buying or works on a particular computer? Need for "$2 per level pricing" so that people who loose interest do not hesitate to buy the next game? Lack of differential pricing for developing countries.
Most restaurants do not have problem with patrons running off without paying the bill. Game/general software industry needs to figure out how they encourage the behaviour that hurts them.
So LEDS are a double edged sword for the lighting industry, on the one hand they're the best of the best for the environment, but on the other hand there is no turnover of bulbs. you'll be giving the LED bulbs to your grandkids before they have to replace them...
That's nothing. Furniture, screwdrivers, silverware, toys, pottery or refrigerator magnets can last hundreds of years with due care. We are finding artifacts of some of these kinds from ancient egyptians. And yet sales are going strong.
People will break the light bulb and buy new fixtures no matter what. There will always be a market in millions of units per year worldwide, enough for at least a couple of companies to justify investment in infrastructure. If existing companies do not deal with a change, there is plenty of incentive for a startup that only manufactures LEDs.
It's also worth mentioning that the bill actually restricts CIA, independent contractors and so on to the interrogation rules used by US military, which do not include waterboarding.
ACLU's position is that private procession of some kinds of arms, such as bazookas, torpedoes, SCUD missiles and nuclear weapons is going to have to be regulated no matter when constitution says to prevent complete annihilation of our civilization. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine resisting a military force backed by corrupt federal government without some of these weapons. Therefore, it's unreasonable to oppose every gun control law.