The Apple 20" is overpriced; you can get a 20" Viewsonic from Newegg for $870 or a 20" Nec from Computer3G for $1220. And the last one is *much* better than the Apple 20".
Apple will probably cut the price on their 20" soon though.
On the first point you do have a point, but just becasue it's common doesn't make it anything more just. When the orignal poster talked about "more serious and interesting instences of banning" I think he refeered to the fact that although banning books from school-children is "bad" it's "worse" to destroy the books of a writer or censor the publication of a scientific article, both aimed at adults.
On the second point yes, the talk about "cencentration camps" was stupid, but that is not the point, If they first had reviewed it on a scientific basis and decided to publish it, they should not back off just because some of their readers dislike the wording in the paper. The paper was significant and important in the field and the "concentration camp talk" allthough stupid, was just a detail unrelated to the data, methods or conclusion. People have written far more controversial stuff than erroneously calling a refuge camp a concentartion camp without publishers pulling out.
And the "common with earlier studies" was the Observers remark, not the writer(s) or the publisher.
After the controversy Villena resubmitted the paper without the "concentration remarks", you can read in the Observer article how he agreed that they where irrellevant to the conclusion in the paper, and the publisher agreed to consider it for publication. But they never published it.
You can search their archives here and here but you won't find anything.
Even without the "concentration camp" remark they would not publish it. How do you explain that?
So much for "providing an exchange of information and ideas on structural polymorphism of HLA genes" .
It's not that both cases involves jews. That's irrellevant.
It's that:
1. Both cases happened in two democracies, Germany and USA. IMHO we should expect more from two free nations like that.
2. The second case was a scientific one where a paper had gone through peer review and had been classified as "scientificly good enough and relevant" but later was censored by the publisher because of the controversial topic.
The hubs are sometimes public, but in these cases admission to the hub required you to share your own collection for free as well. So the hub owners are not only sharing music with a select membership, they require their members to share large amounts of music as well.
I don't know about this one but 99% of the hubs out there require that you share X GB of meaningfull data. That could be your homevideos, Linux distros, or RIAA music.
So the hub owners makes the infringement possible, but they are not more guilty on that point than any ISP/shareware site/programmer.
Newsflash!
Rumor has it that the Justice department/FBI/Police do have limited resources. Some may suggest that they should practise some prioritizing.
You have watched to much TV and read too little criminology.
New science has pointed out that the effect of for example punishing others is grossly overrated especially by the public. Most experts within criminology agree that the deterrent of very long sentences is non existant in many fields.
Most people still belive in the popular myth that "if we just punish/sentence enough people to life then they will stop doing those evil things". Well it turns out that the world is a bit more complex. People still do drugs even if you can get 20+ years for it.
Funny conspiracy teory you got there, almost as funny as the one from Seinfeld back in the days:
JERRY: Hey, so where's my sneakers?
KRAMER: That's what I wanna know.
JERRY: What do you mean?
KRAMER: Well, I saw Mom and Pop this morning, but when I went by the store on my way home? The place was empty. Everything is gone. Mom and Pop - vrooop - vanished.
JERRY: So all my sneakers are gone?
KRAMER: I'm afraid so. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I've been asking around - they didn't even have any kids.
JERRY: Mom and Pop aren't even a Mom and Pop?!
KRAMER: It was all an act, Jerry. They conned us, and they scored, big time.
ELAINE (amused): So. Mom and Pop's plan was to move into the neighborhood...establish trust...for 48 years. And then, run off with Jerry's sneakers.
Last time I heard about it WHO and many other orgs in US and Europe where conducting studies on it. The big WHO study on the subject is scheduled to be finished in 2006-2007.
It's a good article. For a discussion on this topic (productivity in EU vs USA) check out this pdf from a presentation by the chief economist in OECD at an Economist Conference a couple of months ago.
But one thing that neither he or the Economist mentioned though:
4. US citizens have higher disposable income than EU citizens because US citizens work 40% more hours, i.e. EU citizens have same productivity as US, but work less hours, hence lower GDP/capita. Or to put it another way EU citizens have traded GDP/capita for leisure time, US citizens work much more and hence buy more stuff (TVs, cars,...)
Much of that advantage of higher disposable income is just purly teoretical as americans "have" to use more of those money for private health care and higher education.
IIRC Amercians used twice the amount on private health care compared to Europeans.
The big oil companies, those that really operate on a global basis, are "energy companies" per se but in reallity they are still mainly oil companies..
Remember that they have invested _billions_ each year in their oil business. They have paid (or the state has paid for them) insane amounts of money for all the production capasity, transportation, knowledge, contracts, refineries and all the other infrastructure. They know the oil business, the other people in the oil business and the customers in the oil business.
Most likly they conclude that with a status quo, they will continue to literarily print money.
The incentives for them to change the energy situation are few and elusive. In a world based more on renewable energy and distributed harvesting of the energy they are not guaranteed success. Such a situation would increase competition and make it harder for them to compete at what they are good at.
And you are incorrect about most of the oil ends up in automobiles etc. IIRC, USA uses about 40% of the oil for automobiles/transportation, 20% for power/heating/electro and 40% for industry/chem/stupid plastic toys.
So true. All the other bad films are only small blips on the radar. Occasionally they wil get bad ratings from people at IMDB, then let a few months pass, and they will get better ratings. Gigli got bad ratings in US but much better in Asia. That happens to a lot of US movies.
Manos always takes back the place as the worst film.
Professor Nutt, head of psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol and a senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, said: "People could be vaccinated against drugs at birth as you are against measles. You could say cocaine is more dangerous than measles, for example. It is important that there is a debate on this issue. This is a huge topic - addiction and smoking are major causes of premature death."
I don't understand the reasoning behind his comparison to measles. There are some _major_ differences between cocaine addiction and measles.
1. Measles are transmitted via a virus vs. cocaine which is self inflicted.
2. When you vaccinated a certain percantage of the population the immunisation of the potential transmitters make it almost impossible for the virus to spread. Cocaine will spread by dealers regardless of other cocaine users. You need a measle infected or virus infected person to spread measles, you don't need a cocaine user to spread cocaine. The only way to ensure removal of a cocaine market would be to enforce a very high vaccination rate. And even then you are not guarantted any effect. It will take atleast 25 years with vaccination before one will now how well it works.
3. A measle vaccination guarantees that something like 99.5& of those vaccinated won't get measles. How will the coacaine vaccination deal with new synthetic cocaine variants?
4. Ultimatly people chooses to use cocaine (at least the first time) because of the stimulation, if one could neutralize cocaine people will find other drugs.
5. Last time I check measles causes some 800000 deaths each year (yes that is eight-hundred thousand). And that is with extensive vaccination programs in the western world and several campaigns in the third world. Cocaine is not even close.
And the concept of "preamature death" is a bit extended and diffuse. Before the medics and the health system concentrated on diseases randomly striking people and it classified those deaths as "premature deaths". But now they also (correctly) focus on more or less self inflicted diseases. How long should the society go in order to protect it's citizens against "premature death". Sure it's possible to go all the way and create a nanny state by enforcing thousands of authoritarian rules. But I just don't understand the rationale behind such a policy.
And just because the medical industry are willing to make a buck on extensive vaccination of a self-inflicted disease where is the similatity between protecting the population agains random diseases and protecting everyone agains something that some individuals chooses to inflict upon themselves?
Book prices in USA are lower than in many European countries. And in some of the countries where people read much more than what Americans do, like in Scandinavia, France, Germany, UK and Japan they have to pay more for their books than the average american reader.
If you compare newspaper readership statistics which is somewhat linked to reading of books you will see that you can't blame it on the recent economic downturn either. During the financial crisis in Japan in the ninthies people continued to read newspapers. (and book readership remained more or less frozen AFAIK).
So I don't think price is the problem.
I would rather think that it has something to do with culture. There is a term called "cultural capital", coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The term makes a distinction between the traditional capital value of material wealth and of the cultural "assets" or capabilities of a particular class. Just as traditional capital(money) cultural capital can be aquiered, ignored and converted. Cultural capital again can be divided into several sub-classes just as traditional capital. Some of the sub-classes helps define the person based on the fact that they are "thought into the person" and therefore they can't be changed easily.
For example if your parents are "white trash" you don't read Bourdieu, or any other written text/newspaper, because no one told you about him and you are busy watching the latest news about Lacy Peterson and Kobe Bryant.
On a related case consumers will decide what they want to consume based on their cultural capital. (10 bucks and a beer on continued decline in US book readership...)
The term really makes sense if one belive that people in the USA are more or less to some extent seperated into different classes both economical/social and cultural (regardless of whether you think that this is a good/natural/bad thing). If one say that these differences have increased in the 1992-2002 period it matches the teory that increased differences will lead to a larger gap between peoples cultural capital and also inderectly to a larger gap between those that read more and those that read less.
So even if people in the USA do have the money to buy tons of books some of you don't because the more cable TV you watch the more you are prone to continue subscribing.
Originally the "cash back"/tax deduction/tax break (call it whaterver you want) were put in place as a farming policy in the mid 1970 to help enabling farmers buying a decent (in this case decent as in manufactured in USA) truck.
However, heavy lobbying (GM, C and Ford) managed to get defense contractors and other contractors, landscapers included in the scheme.
In the late eighties creative accountants started to include ordinary companies like small entrepenurs and got IRS approval for this. When the SUV market exploded in the nineties it became common for everyone with a small company (dentists, doctors etc) to get the tax break.
It's allways possibly to debate what came first; the tax break or the SUV (as an evolution from the truck and the station wagon)?
I think the SUV would have appeared sooner or later as an evoutionary thing within car industry but it would never had gotten so widespread without the tax break. And the truck segment would have been far far smaller than today.
The tax break is a protectionistic piece of shit mutated far from the original concept without any thought of the consequences, be it environmental, energy policy or foreign policy. If someone where to write a book on how special interest is allowed to corrupt US policy on several areas the SUV tax break case is a perfect example.
And BTW to the root poster that brought up this topic: The tax break is far greater than $4000. According to Taxpayers for common sence it's possible get tax break around $100000. They site an example where a business owner can buy a $110000 Hummer and deduct $106000.
Yeah, yeah I get the sarcasm. I still can't belive someone modded you 5, Insightful though. Did you even bother to read the articles you linked to?
From your first link:
Updated by timothy, 13 Dec, 5:52GMT: It's Microsoft's monopoly which ESR said could collapse, not the company per se. Apologies for the poor phrasing.
Dude, at least you could have bothered to read the fucking/. blurb if you skip the article.
And the average PC price is still way over $350, probably around $500 and closer to $800 if you include laptops. Very few manufacturers sell sub $350 computers, according to techbargains.com the cheapest Dells are around $450.
And if you look closly you will see that most of those that sell sub $350 computers ship them with (surprise!) Linux. Check the above Wal-Mart link someone posted and click on the specs to seee that it's "based on the Linux operating system"/"Sun Java desktop system"
So even if ESR was a bit quick to announce "the obsolete Microsoft" he's neither totaly wrong or right.
And don't forget active ride suspension developed mainly for Formula 1 in the late eighties and outlawed in 1993 becasue it was too good. A couple of years later most of the tech stared trickling down to reglar cars.
Same with carbon brakes, soon to be outlawed in F1. Mercedes and Audi allready deliver cars with carbon brakes.
And much of the advanced turbo development comes from rally cars (Saab, Mitsubishi, Lancia, Renault, Subaru)
Isn't this an obvious sign that it is something wrong with the legal system since the system does not account for any of the financial differences between Joe Smart Card and megacorp?
The only way it makes sence is if one think about the megacorp as a person who is accidentally richer.
I recently talked to some lab technicians about this. They argued that even if you did'nt account for human error the odds of being wrong are something like 1 in 20000/30000 depending on the methods.
So if one add the human errors (even reasonably smart peolpe like lab techs sometimes fail) the odds are below 1 in 10000. So if California checks their db with 1 million "records" they will get 100 false positives. Scary stuff.
But I guess this is up to the standards in California, because only criminals leave DNA samples on the scene. And since the people do have a felony history they are obviously guilty as the criminals they are..
Slashdot Mirror
Apple will probably cut the price on their 20" soon though.
xmpcr at techemail dot com
(I'm not buying since they don't ship to Europe)
Read this.
On the second point yes, the talk about "cencentration camps" was stupid, but that is not the point, If they first had reviewed it on a scientific basis and decided to publish it, they should not back off just because some of their readers dislike the wording in the paper. The paper was significant and important in the field and the "concentration camp talk" allthough stupid, was just a detail unrelated to the data, methods or conclusion. People have written far more controversial stuff than erroneously calling a refuge camp a concentartion camp without publishers pulling out.
And the "common with earlier studies" was the Observers remark, not the writer(s) or the publisher.
After the controversy Villena resubmitted the paper without the "concentration remarks", you can read in the Observer article how he agreed that they where irrellevant to the conclusion in the paper, and the publisher agreed to consider it for publication. But they never published it.
You can search their archives here and here but you won't find anything.
Even without the "concentration camp" remark they would not publish it. How do you explain that?
So much for "providing an exchange of information and ideas on structural polymorphism of HLA genes" .
It's not that both cases involves jews. That's irrellevant.
It's that:
1. Both cases happened in two democracies, Germany and USA. IMHO we should expect more from two free nations like that.
2. The second case was a scientific one where a paper had gone through peer review and had been classified as "scientificly good enough and relevant" but later was censored by the publisher because of the controversial topic.
The paper is available herefor those that are interested.
That could be your homevideos, Linux distros, or RIAA music.
So the hub owners makes the infringement possible, but they are not more guilty on that point than any ISP/shareware site/programmer.
Newsflash!
Rumor has it that the Justice department/FBI/Police do have limited resources. Some may suggest that they should practise some prioritizing.
New science has pointed out that the effect of for example punishing others is grossly overrated especially by the public. Most experts within criminology agree that the deterrent of very long sentences is non existant in many fields.
Most people still belive in the popular myth that "if we just punish/sentence enough people to life then they will stop doing those evil things". Well it turns out that the world is a bit more complex. People still do drugs even if you can get 20+ years for it.
Groklaw had an article about this some days ago, there are tons of discussion there why a license change;
1. Would be stupid.
2. Won't happen.
The article you linked to talks about "per cent of all homes" so you can't compare that with "majority of US Internet users" from the first report.
Last time I heard about it WHO and many other orgs in US and Europe where conducting studies on it. The big WHO study on the subject is scheduled to be finished in 2006-2007.
But one thing that neither he or the Economist mentioned though:
Much of that advantage of higher disposable income is just purly teoretical as americans "have" to use more of those money for private health care and higher education.IIRC Amercians used twice the amount on private health care compared to Europeans.
Remember that they have invested _billions_ each year in their oil business. They have paid (or the state has paid for them) insane amounts of money for all the production capasity, transportation, knowledge, contracts, refineries and all the other infrastructure. They know the oil business, the other people in the oil business and the customers in the oil business.
Most likly they conclude that with a status quo, they will continue to literarily print money.
The incentives for them to change the energy situation are few and elusive. In a world based more on renewable energy and distributed harvesting of the energy they are not guaranteed success. Such a situation would increase competition and make it harder for them to compete at what they are good at.
And you are incorrect about most of the oil ends up in automobiles etc. IIRC, USA uses about 40% of the oil for automobiles/transportation, 20% for power/heating/electro and 40% for industry/chem/stupid plastic toys.
Manos always takes back the place as the worst film.
1. Measles are transmitted via a virus vs. cocaine which is self inflicted.
2. When you vaccinated a certain percantage of the population the immunisation of the potential transmitters make it almost impossible for the virus to spread. Cocaine will spread by dealers regardless of other cocaine users. You need a measle infected or virus infected person to spread measles, you don't need a cocaine user to spread cocaine. The only way to ensure removal of a cocaine market would be to enforce a very high vaccination rate. And even then you are not guarantted any effect. It will take atleast 25 years with vaccination before one will now how well it works.
3. A measle vaccination guarantees that something like 99.5& of those vaccinated won't get measles. How will the coacaine vaccination deal with new synthetic cocaine variants?
4. Ultimatly people chooses to use cocaine (at least the first time) because of the stimulation, if one could neutralize cocaine people will find other drugs.
5. Last time I check measles causes some 800000 deaths each year (yes that is eight-hundred thousand). And that is with extensive vaccination programs in the western world and several campaigns in the third world. Cocaine is not even close.
And the concept of "preamature death" is a bit extended and diffuse. Before the medics and the health system concentrated on diseases randomly striking people and it classified those deaths as "premature deaths". But now they also (correctly) focus on more or less self inflicted diseases. How long should the society go in order to protect it's citizens against "premature death". Sure it's possible to go all the way and create a nanny state by enforcing thousands of authoritarian rules. But I just don't understand the rationale behind such a policy.
And just because the medical industry are willing to make a buck on extensive vaccination of a self-inflicted disease where is the similatity between protecting the population agains random diseases and protecting everyone agains something that some individuals chooses to inflict upon themselves?
If you compare newspaper readership statistics which is somewhat linked to reading of books you will see that you can't blame it on the recent economic downturn either. During the financial crisis in Japan in the ninthies people continued to read newspapers. (and book readership remained more or less frozen AFAIK).
So I don't think price is the problem.
I would rather think that it has something to do with culture. There is a term called "cultural capital", coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The term makes a distinction between the traditional capital value of material wealth and of the cultural "assets" or capabilities of a particular class. Just as traditional capital(money) cultural capital can be aquiered, ignored and converted. Cultural capital again can be divided into several sub-classes just as traditional capital. Some of the sub-classes helps define the person based on the fact that they are "thought into the person" and therefore they can't be changed easily.
For example if your parents are "white trash" you don't read Bourdieu, or any other written text/newspaper, because no one told you about him and you are busy watching the latest news about Lacy Peterson and Kobe Bryant.
On a related case consumers will decide what they want to consume based on their cultural capital. (10 bucks and a beer on continued decline in US book readership...)
The term really makes sense if one belive that people in the USA are more or less to some extent seperated into different classes both economical/social and cultural (regardless of whether you think that this is a good/natural/bad thing). If one say that these differences have increased in the 1992-2002 period it matches the teory that increased differences will lead to a larger gap between peoples cultural capital and also inderectly to a larger gap between those that read more and those that read less.
So even if people in the USA do have the money to buy tons of books some of you don't because the more cable TV you watch the more you are prone to continue subscribing.
However, heavy lobbying (GM, C and Ford) managed to get defense contractors and other contractors, landscapers included in the scheme.
In the late eighties creative accountants started to include ordinary companies like small entrepenurs and got IRS approval for this. When the SUV market exploded in the nineties it became common for everyone with a small company (dentists, doctors etc) to get the tax break.
It's allways possibly to debate what came first; the tax break or the SUV (as an evolution from the truck and the station wagon)?
I think the SUV would have appeared sooner or later as an evoutionary thing within car industry but it would never had gotten so widespread without the tax break. And the truck segment would have been far far smaller than today.
The tax break is a protectionistic piece of shit mutated far from the original concept without any thought of the consequences, be it environmental, energy policy or foreign policy. If someone where to write a book on how special interest is allowed to corrupt US policy on several areas the SUV tax break case is a perfect example.
And BTW to the root poster that brought up this topic: The tax break is far greater than $4000. According to Taxpayers for common sence it's possible get tax break around $100000. They site an example where a business owner can buy a $110000 Hummer and deduct $106000.
My Grandma is still stuck on SunOS 4.0.3 PSR_A with no upgrade path you insensitive clod!
From your first link:
Dude, at least you could have bothered to read the fuckingAnd the average PC price is still way over $350, probably around $500 and closer to $800 if you include laptops. Very few manufacturers sell sub $350 computers, according to techbargains.com the cheapest Dells are around $450.
And if you look closly you will see that most of those that sell sub $350 computers ship them with (surprise!) Linux. Check the above Wal-Mart link someone posted and click on the specs to seee that it's "based on the Linux operating system"/"Sun Java desktop system"
So even if ESR was a bit quick to announce "the obsolete Microsoft" he's neither totaly wrong or right.
Same with carbon brakes, soon to be outlawed in F1. Mercedes and Audi allready deliver cars with carbon brakes.
And much of the advanced turbo development comes from rally cars (Saab, Mitsubishi, Lancia, Renault, Subaru)
The only way it makes sence is if one think about the megacorp as a person who is accidentally richer.
Justice for all..with money.
So if one add the human errors (even reasonably smart peolpe like lab techs sometimes fail) the odds are below 1 in 10000. So if California checks their db with 1 million "records" they will get 100 false positives. Scary stuff.
But I guess this is up to the standards in California, because only criminals leave DNA samples on the scene. And since the people do have a felony history they are obviously guilty as the criminals they are..
Have you tried the new 2.6.6 kernel? For desktop-use it feels much faster than the 2.4.2x kernels when I use lighter WMs like Icewm and Fluxbox.