Cash comes with it's own pitfalls. First paying for purchases over the internet is quite difficult with cash. It's not something you can send over the internet, and not something you want to send in the mail. Also, credit cards have other perks, like chargebacks, extended warranties, and may other amenities. Provided you pay your card off at the end of every month, it actually make more sense to use a credit card than cash.
If it's something that's easy to accomplish, then they should have to take great pains to do it. The fact of the matter is, is that it is hard to do, especially when your employees aren't security engineers, but rather people with absolutely no training in how to keep this data secure.
I had a professor in univesity for one of my security classes. Basically, he told us that SSL, while it's good at what it does, doesn't really solve the real security issues with transactions happening over the internet. Nobody sniffs the wire or does man in the middle attacks to collect the data, because it's often very difficult, and requires physical access to cables. What they usually do is just break into the back end database that's storing all this data. It's much easier. Him and some of his colleagues came up with a much better system, whereby the credit card info never went to the retailer, but instead just a digital certificate signed by the credit card company that would authorize a payment for some certain amount. In the end, the industry decided not to go with that standard, because it was harder to implement. It solved the real problem, but SSL was adopted because they figured it was good enough. It's interesting to see that decision coming back when if they would have just done it right the first time, we'd have much less problems.
This is very true. My wife stays home with the kid (second one on the way soon). We don't live as lavishly as we could if she worked, but we get by, and I think that my kids are going to end up better because of it. The one we have is pretty young, so it's hard to tell, but it seems like things are working out pretty well. I think that if most people (not all, but most) people just adjusted their budget a bit, that one person could stay home with the kids, at least until they are in school full time, and them go back to work. Having kids is a big responsibility. A little anecdote. My wife works in daycare. They would be closed on holidays (thanksgiving, christmas, victoria day), and some of the parents would actually complain, because they'd rather just drop their kid off at daycare for the day, then spend the day with their kid. That's pretty sad. Some people have kids because they think it's cool, or it's just the next step, but don't stop to think about whether raising a child is something they really want to do.
It's hard to make the job of teacher look like a good one. Other than upping the pay scale, there isn't much you can do. And even then, the job won't be better, it will just pay more. There are many, not all, but many kids who are messed up before any teacher sees them, before the step foot in their first kindergarten class. My brother thought he wanted to become a teacher, until he took a class in high school that let him be a teacher's assistant instead of going to a regular class. That was the first exposure he had to a classroom outside the "advanced" tier. He said that these kids are impossible to teach, and that they don't want to be there. I believe this to be true for a lot of students. Throwing more computers at the problem won't solve anything. These students won't be interested unless they are allowed to talk to friends the whole time, about hair, hockey, cars, movies, and just about anything that isn't related to actual learning. Granted there are some kids who really want to learn, but lets face it, there are a lot of kids who don't want to be there, and no good teacher, or amount of technology can change that.
In Canada, you can drive an old car with no seatbelts. If they weren't originally there, they can't make you install them. You can also drive these old cars, regardless of emissions standards. Basically, the reason is that there's so few cars that it isn't such a big problem, and most of them are used as collectors items, so people don't drive them hundreds of miles a day.
But I'm not a big fan of jazz. Like I said, I'm not going to change my musical tastes, just to get music with better dynamic range. I get a lot of stuff off eMusic, which has only indy bands, but a lot of them suffer from the same problem. The ones that don't aren't recorded in a proper studio, so that brings it's own music quality problems.
You are right. However, it might be easier for the virus to go undetected if all it does is flip a bit on some planned day, when you are expecting to take the computer, rather than acting as a keylogger, or trying to send out data over the network. The less the virus actually does, the less chance it will be detected.
Couldn't a virus or other program running enable this "feature" without the user knowing? Basically you could set up the virus to enable the feature on shutdown, and then steal their laptop afterwards. Then when the thief boots it up, no password required. I would probably be difficult to pull off, but people using whole disk encryption would probably have some interesting data to steal.
This is the exact reason that they test genetic propagation in fruit flies. You can go through very many generations in a very short period of time. Trying to do the same thing with mammals would takes many times longer.
This is an example I always bring up. I was in the checkout line at the grocery store, and one of the celebrity stalker magazines had a big headline on the cover that had spent $700 on their baby stroller. My reaction was, so what, she's a millionaire. Most basic strollers cost around $100. Many people I know who have a family income of around $100,000 will have a stroller worth around $400. So, for her to buy a stroller for $700, would be like someone with an average income spending $10 on a stroller.
Couldn't you just have a completely overpowered car in the 890 class, and then have a computer control, such that it would adjust the speed throughout the run so that it would finish at 8.9 seconds (or as close as possible) every time? What's the penalty for going under 8.9 seconds? I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I know that F1 cars have speed limiters so that they go exactly the right speed in the pits. Why couldn't this be done for drag racing?
Compared to Vista, it's not so bad. I mean, it was way more buggy, but like you said, it was only a stopgap OS, Vista is supposed to be their core operating system, their first major release in over 5 years, and sold to consumers and businesses for everything from desktops to laptops to servers, and the operating system is considered by most to be worse than it's predecessor in almost every way.
It's really too bad that even if we bought proper stereo equipment, that most of the music available is mastered terribly. It's hard to find albums that aren't classical music that aren't mastered at such a high level as to completely remove all the dynamic range available. So, what's the point of buying a proper setup if none of the music you actually like to listen to is recorded well enough to take advantage of the system. I'm not going to change the kind of music I happen to like, just because of bad recording quality though.
It's amazing how many features get left out of windows, that would be so easy to support, yet for some reason never seem to make it in. One feature is loading RAID, SCSI, and IDE Controller card drivers off something other than a floppy disk. The other that really drives me batty is the inability for you to set an image as your wallpaper, and have windows resize it so that the image fills the maximum amount of the screen, without changing the aspect ratio. Seriously, this has been available in Linux for at least 5 years, and Vista still doesn't do this. The algorithm would take 1 person a maximum of 1/2 a day to program, and test, even if they weren't a good programmer. Spending 6 years on Vista and they can't even add simple features like this, that would make so many home user's lives easier, is just terrible.
I've notice this too. I tried to learn guitar, but I felt like the thin strings were slicing into my fingers. I played for a few weeks, but the feeling never went away. So I just stopped trying.
Why can't the guitar just tune itself, but without tightening the strings. If the guitar has a pick-up for each string, then it knows which string is being plucked. Then all you would have to do is pluck each string, so it would have a reference point. Then a small computer inside the guitar changes the sounds to the proper tune and then they are sent to the amp. I'm not sure how feasible something like this is, but I think something along these lines could be done.
But for amateur photographers who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, or even a hundred dollars on Photoshop Elements, gimp is a very good alternative. Just an anecdote, I downloaded the free trial for my wife, she tried it out for a bit, and decided that she liked GIMP better than Photoshop. The reason that she tried Photoshop was that one of her graphic designer friends recommended it to her. But having no formal training, she actually found it easier to use GIMP. People who have been using Photoshop for a long time either through actually buying it, or downloading a pirated copy will probably find it easier to stick with Photoshop than to learn to use GIMP. However, amateurs starting out who don't want to spend any money, will probably do just fine with GIMP.
When were the sales numbers for the PS3 ever acceptable? With Sony being so confident before release, saying that everyone was going to want one, no matter how much it cost, just because it's a playstation, I would say that there numbers have always been pretty low.
The only way I could see privatized health insurance working is with a couple of rules. First, if you have coverage, they can't deny you, if the doctor says you need surgery X, they should be be able to say that the surgery isn't covered, and you have to get surgery Y instead because it's cheaper. Also there should be an upper limit on how much they can charge you. Having health insurance available isn't much good if nobody can afford it. Also, everybody should be able to get health insurance. If they can still make money on those terms, then I could see it working well for the people. However, as it stands, it doesn't work, because even if you're paying, you may not get the help you need, and once you receive some money from them, they will up your premiums to ensure they get their money back, or you cancel so they won't have to pay again next time.
Actually, the Sony software actually facilitates the copying of the CD to the Minidisc. Buying a second CD and copying those tracks would not suffice, because you're just copying CD number 2, which is still stealing, according to them. According to this statement, the only music you should be able to play actual pre-recorded minidiscs, which I don't even think are sold anymore. They even still sell Minidisc players, which from what I can tell, don't even support any DRM'd media formats, and can pretty much only play music which has been ripped from CD, or re-encoded from non-protected formats.
I'm guessing that this player just writes MPEG4 files to a DVD, which it can then play back. Why do we even need Blu-Ray. Couldn't a much cheaper device be made with no blu-ray capabilities that just records the HD Content straight to MPEG4 on DVD? That would actually big a major blow to both HDDVD and BluRay.
However, I don't think that Germany has their own version of the 360 or PS3. So if the game is going to be released in Spain, France, UK, or any other country, then people from Germany could pick it up from a country that is selling it, and play that version.
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Do Europe, Asia or Wouth America, have Walmarts (someone else already mentioned Australia)? I thought it was a purely North American thing.
Many countries actually use plastic money. I'm pretty sure it's harder to counterfeit than traditional paper money.
Cash comes with it's own pitfalls. First paying for purchases over the internet is quite difficult with cash. It's not something you can send over the internet, and not something you want to send in the mail. Also, credit cards have other perks, like chargebacks, extended warranties, and may other amenities. Provided you pay your card off at the end of every month, it actually make more sense to use a credit card than cash.
If it's something that's easy to accomplish, then they should have to take great pains to do it. The fact of the matter is, is that it is hard to do, especially when your employees aren't security engineers, but rather people with absolutely no training in how to keep this data secure.
I had a professor in univesity for one of my security classes. Basically, he told us that SSL, while it's good at what it does, doesn't really solve the real security issues with transactions happening over the internet. Nobody sniffs the wire or does man in the middle attacks to collect the data, because it's often very difficult, and requires physical access to cables. What they usually do is just break into the back end database that's storing all this data. It's much easier. Him and some of his colleagues came up with a much better system, whereby the credit card info never went to the retailer, but instead just a digital certificate signed by the credit card company that would authorize a payment for some certain amount. In the end, the industry decided not to go with that standard, because it was harder to implement. It solved the real problem, but SSL was adopted because they figured it was good enough. It's interesting to see that decision coming back when if they would have just done it right the first time, we'd have much less problems.
This is very true. My wife stays home with the kid (second one on the way soon). We don't live as lavishly as we could if she worked, but we get by, and I think that my kids are going to end up better because of it. The one we have is pretty young, so it's hard to tell, but it seems like things are working out pretty well. I think that if most people (not all, but most) people just adjusted their budget a bit, that one person could stay home with the kids, at least until they are in school full time, and them go back to work. Having kids is a big responsibility. A little anecdote. My wife works in daycare. They would be closed on holidays (thanksgiving, christmas, victoria day), and some of the parents would actually complain, because they'd rather just drop their kid off at daycare for the day, then spend the day with their kid. That's pretty sad. Some people have kids because they think it's cool, or it's just the next step, but don't stop to think about whether raising a child is something they really want to do.
It's hard to make the job of teacher look like a good one. Other than upping the pay scale, there isn't much you can do. And even then, the job won't be better, it will just pay more. There are many, not all, but many kids who are messed up before any teacher sees them, before the step foot in their first kindergarten class. My brother thought he wanted to become a teacher, until he took a class in high school that let him be a teacher's assistant instead of going to a regular class. That was the first exposure he had to a classroom outside the "advanced" tier. He said that these kids are impossible to teach, and that they don't want to be there. I believe this to be true for a lot of students. Throwing more computers at the problem won't solve anything. These students won't be interested unless they are allowed to talk to friends the whole time, about hair, hockey, cars, movies, and just about anything that isn't related to actual learning. Granted there are some kids who really want to learn, but lets face it, there are a lot of kids who don't want to be there, and no good teacher, or amount of technology can change that.
In Canada, you can drive an old car with no seatbelts. If they weren't originally there, they can't make you install them. You can also drive these old cars, regardless of emissions standards. Basically, the reason is that there's so few cars that it isn't such a big problem, and most of them are used as collectors items, so people don't drive them hundreds of miles a day.
But I'm not a big fan of jazz. Like I said, I'm not going to change my musical tastes, just to get music with better dynamic range. I get a lot of stuff off eMusic, which has only indy bands, but a lot of them suffer from the same problem. The ones that don't aren't recorded in a proper studio, so that brings it's own music quality problems.
You are right. However, it might be easier for the virus to go undetected if all it does is flip a bit on some planned day, when you are expecting to take the computer, rather than acting as a keylogger, or trying to send out data over the network. The less the virus actually does, the less chance it will be detected.
Couldn't a virus or other program running enable this "feature" without the user knowing? Basically you could set up the virus to enable the feature on shutdown, and then steal their laptop afterwards. Then when the thief boots it up, no password required. I would probably be difficult to pull off, but people using whole disk encryption would probably have some interesting data to steal.
This is the exact reason that they test genetic propagation in fruit flies. You can go through very many generations in a very short period of time. Trying to do the same thing with mammals would takes many times longer.
This is an example I always bring up. I was in the checkout line at the grocery store, and one of the celebrity stalker magazines had a big headline on the cover that had spent $700 on their baby stroller. My reaction was, so what, she's a millionaire. Most basic strollers cost around $100. Many people I know who have a family income of around $100,000 will have a stroller worth around $400. So, for her to buy a stroller for $700, would be like someone with an average income spending $10 on a stroller.
Couldn't you just have a completely overpowered car in the 890 class, and then have a computer control, such that it would adjust the speed throughout the run so that it would finish at 8.9 seconds (or as close as possible) every time? What's the penalty for going under 8.9 seconds? I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I know that F1 cars have speed limiters so that they go exactly the right speed in the pits. Why couldn't this be done for drag racing?
Compared to Vista, it's not so bad. I mean, it was way more buggy, but like you said, it was only a stopgap OS, Vista is supposed to be their core operating system, their first major release in over 5 years, and sold to consumers and businesses for everything from desktops to laptops to servers, and the operating system is considered by most to be worse than it's predecessor in almost every way.
It's really too bad that even if we bought proper stereo equipment, that most of the music available is mastered terribly. It's hard to find albums that aren't classical music that aren't mastered at such a high level as to completely remove all the dynamic range available. So, what's the point of buying a proper setup if none of the music you actually like to listen to is recorded well enough to take advantage of the system. I'm not going to change the kind of music I happen to like, just because of bad recording quality though.
It's amazing how many features get left out of windows, that would be so easy to support, yet for some reason never seem to make it in. One feature is loading RAID, SCSI, and IDE Controller card drivers off something other than a floppy disk. The other that really drives me batty is the inability for you to set an image as your wallpaper, and have windows resize it so that the image fills the maximum amount of the screen, without changing the aspect ratio. Seriously, this has been available in Linux for at least 5 years, and Vista still doesn't do this. The algorithm would take 1 person a maximum of 1/2 a day to program, and test, even if they weren't a good programmer. Spending 6 years on Vista and they can't even add simple features like this, that would make so many home user's lives easier, is just terrible.
I've notice this too. I tried to learn guitar, but I felt like the thin strings were slicing into my fingers. I played for a few weeks, but the feeling never went away. So I just stopped trying.
Why can't the guitar just tune itself, but without tightening the strings. If the guitar has a pick-up for each string, then it knows which string is being plucked. Then all you would have to do is pluck each string, so it would have a reference point. Then a small computer inside the guitar changes the sounds to the proper tune and then they are sent to the amp. I'm not sure how feasible something like this is, but I think something along these lines could be done.
But for amateur photographers who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, or even a hundred dollars on Photoshop Elements, gimp is a very good alternative. Just an anecdote, I downloaded the free trial for my wife, she tried it out for a bit, and decided that she liked GIMP better than Photoshop. The reason that she tried Photoshop was that one of her graphic designer friends recommended it to her. But having no formal training, she actually found it easier to use GIMP. People who have been using Photoshop for a long time either through actually buying it, or downloading a pirated copy will probably find it easier to stick with Photoshop than to learn to use GIMP. However, amateurs starting out who don't want to spend any money, will probably do just fine with GIMP.
When were the sales numbers for the PS3 ever acceptable? With Sony being so confident before release, saying that everyone was going to want one, no matter how much it cost, just because it's a playstation, I would say that there numbers have always been pretty low.
The only way I could see privatized health insurance working is with a couple of rules. First, if you have coverage, they can't deny you, if the doctor says you need surgery X, they should be be able to say that the surgery isn't covered, and you have to get surgery Y instead because it's cheaper. Also there should be an upper limit on how much they can charge you. Having health insurance available isn't much good if nobody can afford it. Also, everybody should be able to get health insurance. If they can still make money on those terms, then I could see it working well for the people. However, as it stands, it doesn't work, because even if you're paying, you may not get the help you need, and once you receive some money from them, they will up your premiums to ensure they get their money back, or you cancel so they won't have to pay again next time.
Actually, the Sony software actually facilitates the copying of the CD to the Minidisc. Buying a second CD and copying those tracks would not suffice, because you're just copying CD number 2, which is still stealing, according to them. According to this statement, the only music you should be able to play actual pre-recorded minidiscs, which I don't even think are sold anymore. They even still sell Minidisc players, which from what I can tell, don't even support any DRM'd media formats, and can pretty much only play music which has been ripped from CD, or re-encoded from non-protected formats.
I'm guessing that this player just writes MPEG4 files to a DVD, which it can then play back. Why do we even need Blu-Ray. Couldn't a much cheaper device be made with no blu-ray capabilities that just records the HD Content straight to MPEG4 on DVD? That would actually big a major blow to both HDDVD and BluRay.
However, I don't think that Germany has their own version of the 360 or PS3. So if the game is going to be released in Spain, France, UK, or any other country, then people from Germany could pick it up from a country that is selling it, and play that version.