How many Vista Enterprise or Ultimate users really dual boot? Since this article is dated four months ago and this is the first we're hearing about it, I'm guessing not many.
TFA says they deliberately excluded him because he was so popular on the internet and his search results don't correspond to actual votes.
In other words... their examination works great, except when it doesn't. And in that case, we'll just not included that data in the final results.
Wish I could've gotten away with that in college.
Judging from his screenname I think he's a Randite. That particular faction has hangups about condemning intellectual property the way 90% of other anarcho-capitalists do.
It largely stems from Rand's own writings, and her desire to place creators of original ideas on a higher, almost God-like plane of worth from the rest of humanity.
I honestly spend more on downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. than $5 a month anyhow... but what sort of fucked up priorities does a society have when they're being bankrupted by multi-trillion dollar imperial ambitions, their financial markets are collapsing, and they think it makes sense to socialize at a federal level all the costs of downloading music?
This is not just monstrously immoral, it is economically dubious. 8.5 million customers * $5 a month * 12 months = $510 million a year. Now... think about the dramatic decline in CD sales. Think about how it will effect Amazon/iTunes sales if P2P music is not only legal, but a service we're charged for whether we use it or not. In pretty short order, materially all of the music industry's sales, apart from concert tickets, will be a direct government handout paid for by a tax. If that's not a recipe for stifling innovation, I don't know what is.
Moreover, if this makes sense to people, why stop here? Why not charge everyone who has a cell phone $10 a month for bottled water, then just have bottled water free to take home at the library? Sure, it screws over the people who don't use bottled water, but it would provide a convenient revenue stream for the bottled water companies, and isn't that really more important than maintaining at least a semblance of market-pricing?
You've got Universal and Paramount, you've got an embarrassment of riches of potential content, so why can I count the significant releases coming this quarter on one hand?
If you're going to make a race of this at all, you guys seriously need to get some content out there. You've got the whole Star Trek library to work with for Christsakes, why is the first season of TOS the only HD-DVD content out there? Where are the resplendent 1080p releases of all the movies? Ditto for Indiana Jones.
Having just bought my HD DVD player a couple of months ago, I'm glad to hear they've decided to make it a race. But I'd be more glad to see some new releases I actually want to buy.
You sort of answered your own question. The US doesn't have jurisdiction over them, so there is no (legal) way they can ban them. This is the legal equivalent of the United States telling its citizens they can't eat canned corn in Poland because Poland's canned corn regulations aren't in line with America's internal regulations.
and since AT&T isn't a branch of Congress (more like an unowned subsidiary of the NSA), the Constitution wouldn't apply. If I'm in a restaurant loudly complaining about my lunch, the restaurant isn't required constitutionally to sell me dessert.
AT&T's disincentive to use this is that if they lose customers they lose money. This isn't the 1970's and even if a handful of people living in the ass-end of Wyoming don't have a lot of competitors to choose from, the vast, vast majority of their customers (99%+ I'm sure) can easily just go get a new phone company, or a competitor's broadband, or a new cell phone.
I'm not sure about nationwide, but I live in a fairly small town and there are several competitors to AT&T in every industry they're in.
And IANAL, but I don't think reserving the right to cancel service would constitute an unfair agreement. Those laws (to the extent that a big company thats in good with the surveillance state can't just bribe their way out of them) are really more for things like contracts that allow outright theft or other activity that would be criminal outside of the contract. Like for instance if the TOS had a clause that said "If AT&T happens to overhear your credit card number in one of its many illegal wiretaps, you agree to hold AT&T blameless if they charge a bunch of Thinkgeek merchandise".
Even more valuable to the military would be if they could make a copy machine that takes transcripts of Iranian politicians' speeches and mistranslates them all into threats against Israel. The number of man-hours they spend doing it by hand must be staggering.
And an insult to the innocent people executed and imprisoned by the vile, corrupt government of America. These are two very distinct varieties of evil, lets not conflate the two.
In all seriousness though, if one were theoretically not buying American or Chinese... there are plenty of Japanese laptop makers, and those guys haven't committted a fresh atrocity in generations.
Indeed, remember earlier this year when it was widely reported that Iran was requiring its Jews to wear badges similar to the ones in Nazi Germany? Remember all the outrage on Fox News about how they have to be stopped, and military force is the only thing those people understand?
The next day it was revealed that the story was a complete fabrication made up by a pro-war Canadian newspaper called the National Post. Remember all those apologies Fox News made for nearly lying us into war again? Me neither...
Deceleration is a big pain here... if we're assuming the ship is unmanned and just there to pave the way for a later colony ship can't we just make the thing really durable and assume it'll stop when it smacks into its destination?
Sure, it'll probably cause an extinction event killing whatever's already living there, but the robots would probably do that eventually just by terraforming the place for humanity.
That's a good point, but it's not as though those wars of aggression in oil producing regions of the world are actually necessary to the availability of those sources. There are plenty of nations that aren't spending enormous chunks of their GDP on imperial ambitions and they aren't having any real problem acquiring fossil fuels.
I still think the best way to go about this is to let the polluting and non-polluting solutions compete on a level playing field and trust that in the end, people will do the right thing.
The big danger with those three solutions you've given that I see is that #2 and #1 are operating at cross purposes. If you ban all the competition there's very little incentive for research to continue. Imagine if when the rechargable NiCd batteries hit the market in the mid 90's we'd recognized that they pollute less than disposables and outlawed the later. Would as much money have been spent making rechargable batteries cheaper and more efficient and indeed, even more environmentally friendly? I bought NiCds back then because they made some sense economically even if they were a major hassle. At this point I couldn't imagine buying anything but rechargables for a regularly used device.
There's a lot of stuff to address here... I guess I would say that:
1. the US weathered it's 16 fold increase in gas prices without significantly cutting consumption. The goal of global warming taxes isn't just to be a largely regressive tax, it's to cut usage. How high do we have to drive the price before people actually start cutting consumption (I've seen estimates from $5 a gallon to $20 a gallon)? And what do we do about all the consequences of this (rising costs of goods, lower-middle-class people spending almost their entire paycheck on fuel to drive to work, etc)?
2. Using your iceberg analogy, it's really more like throwing a bunch of women and children off the ship to lighten the load, while at the same time the people who claim to see the iceberg keep saying it's nowhere near enough to be able to turn in time anyhow.
3. My position isn't contradictory, I'm presenting other peoples' solutions to problems they see... which brings up an interesting point, even if science is more about taking votes than taking measurements nowadays (which probably isn't a healthy thing), the people who believe in global warming don't all believe in a single, unified theory. One guy says we have 500 years, another guy says we have 20, another says it's completely too late.
Without having a solid knowledge of:
a) what's happening b) what's causing it c) whether we even can fix it d) exactly how we'd go about doing that
there's a risk that we're going to ruin the lives of a lot of people for nothing, and that's not a risk I'm willing to sign my name to.
Think of it like invading Iraq, because I see a strong parallel there. A strong group of true believers that doesn't have actual proof, but claims the debate is over... and furthermore claims that inaction is unthinkable. Then they go off half-cocked and ruin millions of lives, discover that their hunch was wrong, and just shrug and smirk. Only this time we're not talking about the damage being confined to a single country, rather the entire world.
We should be heading in the direction of cleaner fuels, we should be reducing energy consumption, we should be reducing waste. As others have already pointed out, even in the absense of global warming there are plenty of good reasons not to pollute. But that stuff is happening largely on it's own. The worldwide solar industry is growing by leaps and bounds without the world's governments outlawing fossil fuels... people are using compact fluorescent bulbs and LCD Tvs (both of which a significant power savers) without being ordered to under threat of imprisonment.
That's what concerns me the most... that we'll damage the economy so much with half-assed solutions to problems we don't fully understand and which might not even exist that we'll slow the development of the technology that promises to solve real problems, and might just provide more realistic solutions if at some point we actually know what we're dealing with in regards to global warming.
How many Vista Enterprise or Ultimate users really dual boot? Since this article is dated four months ago and this is the first we're hearing about it, I'm guessing not many.
TFA says they deliberately excluded him because he was so popular on the internet and his search results don't correspond to actual votes.
In other words... their examination works great, except when it doesn't. And in that case, we'll just not included that data in the final results.
Wish I could've gotten away with that in college.
Judging from his screenname I think he's a Randite. That particular faction has hangups about condemning intellectual property the way 90% of other anarcho-capitalists do. It largely stems from Rand's own writings, and her desire to place creators of original ideas on a higher, almost God-like plane of worth from the rest of humanity.
I honestly spend more on downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. than $5 a month anyhow... but what sort of fucked up priorities does a society have when they're being bankrupted by multi-trillion dollar imperial ambitions, their financial markets are collapsing, and they think it makes sense to socialize at a federal level all the costs of downloading music?
This is not just monstrously immoral, it is economically dubious. 8.5 million customers * $5 a month * 12 months = $510 million a year. Now... think about the dramatic decline in CD sales. Think about how it will effect Amazon/iTunes sales if P2P music is not only legal, but a service we're charged for whether we use it or not. In pretty short order, materially all of the music industry's sales, apart from concert tickets, will be a direct government handout paid for by a tax. If that's not a recipe for stifling innovation, I don't know what is.
Moreover, if this makes sense to people, why stop here? Why not charge everyone who has a cell phone $10 a month for bottled water, then just have bottled water free to take home at the library? Sure, it screws over the people who don't use bottled water, but it would provide a convenient revenue stream for the bottled water companies, and isn't that really more important than maintaining at least a semblance of market-pricing?
You've got Universal and Paramount, you've got an embarrassment of riches of potential content, so why can I count the significant releases coming this quarter on one hand?
If you're going to make a race of this at all, you guys seriously need to get some content out there. You've got the whole Star Trek library to work with for Christsakes, why is the first season of TOS the only HD-DVD content out there? Where are the resplendent 1080p releases of all the movies? Ditto for Indiana Jones.
Having just bought my HD DVD player a couple of months ago, I'm glad to hear they've decided to make it a race. But I'd be more glad to see some new releases I actually want to buy.
All-night Battle Mode marathons in MK64 in the block fort... as much as I loved Perfect Dark yeah, no question it was Mario Kart
You sort of answered your own question. The US doesn't have jurisdiction over them, so there is no (legal) way they can ban them. This is the legal equivalent of the United States telling its citizens they can't eat canned corn in Poland because Poland's canned corn regulations aren't in line with America's internal regulations.
You can't even get on a bus anymore without some guy in a silly uniform demanding to rummage through your personal papers.
it says "Congress shall make no law..."
and since AT&T isn't a branch of Congress (more like an unowned subsidiary of the NSA), the Constitution wouldn't apply. If I'm in a restaurant loudly complaining about my lunch, the restaurant isn't required constitutionally to sell me dessert.
AT&T's disincentive to use this is that if they lose customers they lose money. This isn't the 1970's and even if a handful of people living in the ass-end of Wyoming don't have a lot of competitors to choose from, the vast, vast majority of their customers (99%+ I'm sure) can easily just go get a new phone company, or a competitor's broadband, or a new cell phone.
I'm not sure about nationwide, but I live in a fairly small town and there are several competitors to AT&T in every industry they're in.
And IANAL, but I don't think reserving the right to cancel service would constitute an unfair agreement. Those laws (to the extent that a big company thats in good with the surveillance state can't just bribe their way out of them) are really more for things like contracts that allow outright theft or other activity that would be criminal outside of the contract. Like for instance if the TOS had a clause that said "If AT&T happens to overhear your credit card number in one of its many illegal wiretaps, you agree to hold AT&T blameless if they charge a bunch of Thinkgeek merchandise".
Even more valuable to the military would be if they could make a copy machine that takes transcripts of Iranian politicians' speeches and mistranslates them all into threats against Israel. The number of man-hours they spend doing it by hand must be staggering.
And an insult to the innocent people executed and imprisoned by the vile, corrupt government of America. These are two very distinct varieties of evil, lets not conflate the two.
In all seriousness though, if one were theoretically not buying American or Chinese... there are plenty of Japanese laptop makers, and those guys haven't committted a fresh atrocity in generations.
What percentage of the US food supply is used up keeping humans alive to maintain the internet? My God... this thing is a monster!
Kerry has had almost a week though, I haven't seen any answers, have you?
... which is why police states are bad.
So police had to taser a college kid for asking an uncomfortable question of a politician "to stop anarchy"?
Sounds to me like the sort of anarchy we could use a little more of.
Indeed, remember earlier this year when it was widely reported that Iran was requiring its Jews to wear badges similar to the ones in Nazi Germany? Remember all the outrage on Fox News about how they have to be stopped, and military force is the only thing those people understand?
The next day it was revealed that the story was a complete fabrication made up by a pro-war Canadian newspaper called the National Post. Remember all those apologies Fox News made for nearly lying us into war again? Me neither...
When is it ever not "post a counter assertion without any effort to actually provide some backing" day at Slashdot.
If we didn't have 20-30 posts that make no sense and 5-10 replies each that amount to RTFA, these comment sections would be damned short.
Deceleration is a big pain here... if we're assuming the ship is unmanned and just there to pave the way for a later colony ship can't we just make the thing really durable and assume it'll stop when it smacks into its destination?
Sure, it'll probably cause an extinction event killing whatever's already living there, but the robots would probably do that eventually just by terraforming the place for humanity.
That's a good point, but it's not as though those wars of aggression in oil producing regions of the world are actually necessary to the availability of those sources. There are plenty of nations that aren't spending enormous chunks of their GDP on imperial ambitions and they aren't having any real problem acquiring fossil fuels.
Can we extend that one further:
If there was absolutely no money in environmental science no one would publish.
Therefore all environmental science is invalid?
I don't need a mammogram. Maybe they should take those breast cancer awareness commercials off the TV!
You make a persuasive argument.
I still think the best way to go about this is to let the polluting and non-polluting solutions compete on a level playing field and trust that in the end, people will do the right thing.
The big danger with those three solutions you've given that I see is that #2 and #1 are operating at cross purposes. If you ban all the competition there's very little incentive for research to continue. Imagine if when the rechargable NiCd batteries hit the market in the mid 90's we'd recognized that they pollute less than disposables and outlawed the later. Would as much money have been spent making rechargable batteries cheaper and more efficient and indeed, even more environmentally friendly? I bought NiCds back then because they made some sense economically even if they were a major hassle. At this point I couldn't imagine buying anything but rechargables for a regularly used device.
There's a lot of stuff to address here... I guess I would say that:
1. the US weathered it's 16 fold increase in gas prices without significantly cutting consumption. The goal of global warming taxes isn't just to be a largely regressive tax, it's to cut usage. How high do we have to drive the price before people actually start cutting consumption (I've seen estimates from $5 a gallon to $20 a gallon)? And what do we do about all the consequences of this (rising costs of goods, lower-middle-class people spending almost their entire paycheck on fuel to drive to work, etc)?
2. Using your iceberg analogy, it's really more like throwing a bunch of women and children off the ship to lighten the load, while at the same time the people who claim to see the iceberg keep saying it's nowhere near enough to be able to turn in time anyhow.
3. My position isn't contradictory, I'm presenting other peoples' solutions to problems they see... which brings up an interesting point, even if science is more about taking votes than taking measurements nowadays (which probably isn't a healthy thing), the people who believe in global warming don't all believe in a single, unified theory. One guy says we have 500 years, another guy says we have 20, another says it's completely too late.
Without having a solid knowledge of:
a) what's happening
b) what's causing it
c) whether we even can fix it
d) exactly how we'd go about doing that
there's a risk that we're going to ruin the lives of a lot of people for nothing, and that's not a risk I'm willing to sign my name to.
Think of it like invading Iraq, because I see a strong parallel there. A strong group of true believers that doesn't have actual proof, but claims the debate is over... and furthermore claims that inaction is unthinkable. Then they go off half-cocked and ruin millions of lives, discover that their hunch was wrong, and just shrug and smirk. Only this time we're not talking about the damage being confined to a single country, rather the entire world.
We should be heading in the direction of cleaner fuels, we should be reducing energy consumption, we should be reducing waste. As others have already pointed out, even in the absense of global warming there are plenty of good reasons not to pollute. But that stuff is happening largely on it's own. The worldwide solar industry is growing by leaps and bounds without the world's governments outlawing fossil fuels... people are using compact fluorescent bulbs and LCD Tvs (both of which a significant power savers) without being ordered to under threat of imprisonment.
That's what concerns me the most... that we'll damage the economy so much with half-assed solutions to problems we don't fully understand and which might not even exist that we'll slow the development of the technology that promises to solve real problems, and might just provide more realistic solutions if at some point we actually know what we're dealing with in regards to global warming.
How about you do me a favor and provide a counter-example instead of just pithy responses with asterixed out curses?