It comes from sea water, using energy from centralised power stations which can draw power from renewable sources, or can at least have emissions scrubbed/captured far more effectively from a single chimney than we could possibly manage on a few million individual exhaust pipes.
It also reduces reliance on a single source of energy as well as allowing (once it is in place) a switch from one source to another at will without having to convince millions of people to replace/convert their existing vehicles.
A renewable storage medium is just what we need; it's far easier to worry about the actual energy sources once we've centralised them to allow for a combination of different ones and the benefits of large scale use.
I still don't see how the fax is any more secure or tamper-resistant than the email. It should be that both are 'secure enough' or neither - if a company allows one but not the other then they are giving themselves the illusion of security, and that's more harmful than simply accepting that a system has flaws.
But most people don't have a fax machine, so almost any forms that have to be faxed from customer to business will just have the number of the nearest copy shop with a fax service. If you're faxing a form that you've filled in then the "stationary" is already covered.
The only thing left is the signature, and the security of that is no different whether it's email, fax or a photocopy delivered by carrier pigeon.
Did you even read that post before you replied to it? The first line ends with "...detracts from the damages to civil liberties that are happening in the UK.". The poster's whole point was that we've got enough real problems without painting an interesting (if potentially stupid) little marketing scheme as one of them and trivialising them by doing so.
Why? They wouldn't be competing with Dell, they'd be competing with themselves. People don't (and never will, I'll bet) buy a Mac because it's the cheapest, they buy it because they feel it's superior in some way and thus worth the money.
What they would have to worry about is cannibalising the iMac sales, because a standard-tower Mac plus a third party monitor, graphics card & RAM would be cheaper than an iMac and superior in every way except form-factor, which isn't really high on most people's list for a desktop.
I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure that it is a cultural difference between the Chinese and the 'West'. I know that's how many people (a lot of them pro-government Chinese, from what I've seen) are presenting it, but I think they may be mistaken.
Think of some of the things that the British or American governments do and say with more or less full support of their populations. There are plenty willing to argue that the government is doing 'x, y or z' in our best interests despite the fact that history has demonstrated that even the best intentions are almost always corrupted. In the same way that many 'western' people accept that far-reaching new laws will only be used against terrorists and are necessary to protect us, many of the chinese accept that their government is protecting them from biased international propaganda rather than more or less the exact opposite.
My point is this: perhaps it's a function of general human apathy more than of any one particular culture.
And the question we all have to ask is whether we believe that anybody can be trusted to say that they know best when it comes to what is and isn't allowable for us to access. I believe that even if we did come up with a theoretical list of content that we all found abhorrent and agreed should be blocked, it would still be a mistake to do so because at that moment we would be placing the infrastructure for anybody in power to take it further, 'for our own good'. Nobody can be trusted with that power, especially because it is exactly the power needed to cover up ones own abuses.
I had also heard that the astronauts would visit the RSO before their flights with pictures of their families, just to be sure he knows exactly whose lives he would be affecting if he had to destroy the shuttle. That's interesting, I'd actually heard the opposite - that the RSO is not allowed to meet the astronauts at all in order to ensure that they make rational, not emotional, decisions if it comes down to it.
I am from the UK! The only reason I brought up the US 'making available' theory was that if I hadn't mentioned it someone else would have and it is by no means proven in either jurisdiction. I didn't think the rest of the post was really related to the specific laws as much as to logic and a basic knowledge of computers.
Since I haven't actually said it yet, IANAL, but I really think that it comes down to the technical details of their argument, not the legal ones. No matter how the law is worded, downloading is not the same as uploading and neither is a willingness to upload. I'm not saying that they couldn't sue him based on the evidence they have, just that if they're going to try, they should at least make sure they're suing him for the right thing!
This is partially why I was questioning their competence - they aren't trying to sue for distribution, they're suing for the act of having downloaded the game. If they simply jump onto the torrent and write down the IP addresses of the peers they have no evidence of anything other than the fact that the peer appeared to be sharing that file and possibly that they uploaded the sections that the lawyers' machine received. They have no idea whether the file was downloaded or placed there legitimately, and if they want to sue the user for distributing that copy then they should make that clear in their case.
Again, I would question their competence for trying to accuse someone of making an illegal download without sufficient evidence - all that they have evidence of is 'making available' (and we all know that that has been called into question recently) or perhaps of uploading to their machine. If they do, in fact, have evidence of downloading then I would question what further corroborating information the ISPs have been providing.
Reading back this post, I realise how weasel-worded it sounds and how much it is based on seemingly insignificant technicalities, but to be frank that is exactly how litigation is often performed and large companies have proved time and again that they have no interest in the spirit of the laws beyond the extent that they are of benefit to them. All I suggest is that we take the same attitude in return.
I would absolutely agree that they've demonstrated incompetence at best, and have wilfully wasted time before the deadline at worst - to me this throws into question a lot of things about their case. Where did the evidence come from, for example? I've actually been wondering about that for a while when people are found to have 'x' infringing content on their machine; how do the lawyers know what you have downloaded? At what level are they monitoring us, and who are they cooperating with to do so?
Any of the iSight or newer white ones have much the same arrangement, actually, but sans glass (I thought it was plastic, but I may be wrong). The worst of it is the adhesive metal tape around the LCD - it's difficult to remove, sticks to everything and generally gets in the way.
The repairability of Apple machines seems to be very oddly hit or miss - the original white G5 iMacs are a pleasure to work on; the main components are even held on their own sub-assembly meaning that it's a relatively quick job to separate the computer from the LCD despite them being in the same case. Suddenly they switch to the setup you described above and it's almost more effort than its worth to deal with the things.
While I'm not American, I will say that an extra 3kg or so is an inconvenience compared to just under 1kg. It's not as if we're all suddenly lacking the muscle mass to carry a 15" machine or that we're so lazy we don't want to expend the extra energy, it's that if you want a machine with you all the time then it will get irritating to carry the larger one - the smaller and lighter the machine, the more likely it is to become something you carry everywhere and thus have whenever you need it (or, to put it another way, if you know you're going to potentially need a laptop at any time while you're out, the eee is going to get much less annoying to carry all day every day).
I like OSX, and to me it's worth the premium (for now, at least) that I pay on the overall package. I'm sure many others agree. That means if they just took the Mac Mini's guts, threw them in a small tower with a 3.5" hard drive and a PCI-E slot and sold them for the same price as the Mini, I'd buy them. As far as I can see that would have a slightly bigger profit margin for Apple - fewer heat issues, less hassle dealing with cramped motherboards and the ability to use cheaper hard drives. They wouldn't have to compete with Dell and accept tiny margins because they have something to set them apart from the commodity machines that are sold more or less on price alone.
That said, I suppose they are playing the game and they're doing it well - they (rightly) bet that a user like myself, who would have bought that machine I described plus a decent 24" LCD, will instead buy the iMac (which I did) essentially purchasing the monitor from them too. Those who wouldn't buy the iMac will stick with the Mini. Net gain for Apple, some level of irritation for the customers, but not quite enough to put them off next time. Apple wins, but I don't quite feel like I've lost.
I do find their limits to be quite fair, but there is (as far as I am aware) no system for warnings as the limits are being reached. They do provide usage data for that month on your user account page, though. They don't cap your rate after you hit the limit, but to be honest I'm glad about that - I'd rather just get an email and take it upon myself to level off that month. Basically the reason I mentioned it is because the charges are treated more as a penalty than as a fee for a little extra usage, meaning it's very much in your interests not to reach them. That said, I am still very pleased with them overall, and I'm happy to recommend them.
Unless I'm reading something very wrongly, holy crap they're expensive! I know you have to pay for good service, but those per GB charges are insane. You'll certainly pay more for a 'real' connection than you would if you went with TalkTalk or Sky, but you don't have to take it to the extremes of what these people are charging.
I'm pleased overall with my Entanet DSL. All the resellers seem to offer the same price packages, so I use UKFSN (no association with them other than as a customer) who use all of their profits to fund UK free software projects. The business packages are reasonably priced and seem to be the closest thing you can get to a direct, neutral, non 'managed' connection these days. They also offer genuine unlimited packages, although the prices might be a bit of a shock to people used to the so-called unlimited offerings from other ISPs.
The one thing that I would fault them on is their data transfer allowance system. Basically the penalty fees for going a few GB over the limit will add about 50% to that month's bill.
I think that people are making far too much of an issue of the whole thing. Digital tuner boxes are cheap, simple and easy to get hold of. I know we're on a slightly different system here, but they start at about £10 which is equivalent to $20, half the value of the vouchers that your government is dishing out for the switchover! A product that will need a £10 upgrade for some users (i.e. those without cable or satellite) really does not need to be banned from import.
Absolutely agreed. I can totally see the market for laptops that'll run games, Photoshop and the like but I'm not in that market - I'll do those things on a bigger screen for less money with my desktop because I don't need to do them on the move.
What I want from a laptop is small size and weight - something I can carry everywhere just to get the odd bit of work done, browse the web or check my email. The system requirements for that really aren't changing that greatly any time soon. Previously there was no such thing as a small cheap laptop, you couldn't trade off power for price and you simply couldn't buy a small machine for anything like the same money as a 15" one. I'm exceedingly happy that there is now a machine that fits my needs, and I can't wait until the various 8.9" models come on sale because I'm buying one in a snap.
Slashdot Mirror
It comes from sea water, using energy from centralised power stations which can draw power from renewable sources, or can at least have emissions scrubbed/captured far more effectively from a single chimney than we could possibly manage on a few million individual exhaust pipes.
It also reduces reliance on a single source of energy as well as allowing (once it is in place) a switch from one source to another at will without having to convince millions of people to replace/convert their existing vehicles.
A renewable storage medium is just what we need; it's far easier to worry about the actual energy sources once we've centralised them to allow for a combination of different ones and the benefits of large scale use.
I still don't see how the fax is any more secure or tamper-resistant than the email. It should be that both are 'secure enough' or neither - if a company allows one but not the other then they are giving themselves the illusion of security, and that's more harmful than simply accepting that a system has flaws.
That's interesting, but all it really means is that the law is inconsistent and needs to be fixed.
But most people don't have a fax machine, so almost any forms that have to be faxed from customer to business will just have the number of the nearest copy shop with a fax service. If you're faxing a form that you've filled in then the "stationary" is already covered.
The only thing left is the signature, and the security of that is no different whether it's email, fax or a photocopy delivered by carrier pigeon.
Did you even read that post before you replied to it? The first line ends with "...detracts from the damages to civil liberties that are happening in the UK.". The poster's whole point was that we've got enough real problems without painting an interesting (if potentially stupid) little marketing scheme as one of them and trivialising them by doing so.
Why? They wouldn't be competing with Dell, they'd be competing with themselves. People don't (and never will, I'll bet) buy a Mac because it's the cheapest, they buy it because they feel it's superior in some way and thus worth the money.
What they would have to worry about is cannibalising the iMac sales, because a standard-tower Mac plus a third party monitor, graphics card & RAM would be cheaper than an iMac and superior in every way except form-factor, which isn't really high on most people's list for a desktop.
I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure that it is a cultural difference between the Chinese and the 'West'. I know that's how many people (a lot of them pro-government Chinese, from what I've seen) are presenting it, but I think they may be mistaken.
Think of some of the things that the British or American governments do and say with more or less full support of their populations. There are plenty willing to argue that the government is doing 'x, y or z' in our best interests despite the fact that history has demonstrated that even the best intentions are almost always corrupted. In the same way that many 'western' people accept that far-reaching new laws will only be used against terrorists and are necessary to protect us, many of the chinese accept that their government is protecting them from biased international propaganda rather than more or less the exact opposite.
My point is this: perhaps it's a function of general human apathy more than of any one particular culture.
And the question we all have to ask is whether we believe that anybody can be trusted to say that they know best when it comes to what is and isn't allowable for us to access. I believe that even if we did come up with a theoretical list of content that we all found abhorrent and agreed should be blocked, it would still be a mistake to do so because at that moment we would be placing the infrastructure for anybody in power to take it further, 'for our own good'. Nobody can be trusted with that power, especially because it is exactly the power needed to cover up ones own abuses.
Unfortunately your probably right, although with the caveat that it is very dependent on how the question is phrased.
I am from the UK! The only reason I brought up the US 'making available' theory was that if I hadn't mentioned it someone else would have and it is by no means proven in either jurisdiction. I didn't think the rest of the post was really related to the specific laws as much as to logic and a basic knowledge of computers.
Since I haven't actually said it yet, IANAL, but I really think that it comes down to the technical details of their argument, not the legal ones. No matter how the law is worded, downloading is not the same as uploading and neither is a willingness to upload. I'm not saying that they couldn't sue him based on the evidence they have, just that if they're going to try, they should at least make sure they're suing him for the right thing!
I've posted my assumptions on why this cannot be a valid method for this particular case.
This is partially why I was questioning their competence - they aren't trying to sue for distribution, they're suing for the act of having downloaded the game. If they simply jump onto the torrent and write down the IP addresses of the peers they have no evidence of anything other than the fact that the peer appeared to be sharing that file and possibly that they uploaded the sections that the lawyers' machine received. They have no idea whether the file was downloaded or placed there legitimately, and if they want to sue the user for distributing that copy then they should make that clear in their case.
Again, I would question their competence for trying to accuse someone of making an illegal download without sufficient evidence - all that they have evidence of is 'making available' (and we all know that that has been called into question recently) or perhaps of uploading to their machine. If they do, in fact, have evidence of downloading then I would question what further corroborating information the ISPs have been providing.
Reading back this post, I realise how weasel-worded it sounds and how much it is based on seemingly insignificant technicalities, but to be frank that is exactly how litigation is often performed and large companies have proved time and again that they have no interest in the spirit of the laws beyond the extent that they are of benefit to them. All I suggest is that we take the same attitude in return.
I would absolutely agree that they've demonstrated incompetence at best, and have wilfully wasted time before the deadline at worst - to me this throws into question a lot of things about their case. Where did the evidence come from, for example? I've actually been wondering about that for a while when people are found to have 'x' infringing content on their machine; how do the lawyers know what you have downloaded? At what level are they monitoring us, and who are they cooperating with to do so?
Any of the iSight or newer white ones have much the same arrangement, actually, but sans glass (I thought it was plastic, but I may be wrong). The worst of it is the adhesive metal tape around the LCD - it's difficult to remove, sticks to everything and generally gets in the way.
The repairability of Apple machines seems to be very oddly hit or miss - the original white G5 iMacs are a pleasure to work on; the main components are even held on their own sub-assembly meaning that it's a relatively quick job to separate the computer from the LCD despite them being in the same case. Suddenly they switch to the setup you described above and it's almost more effort than its worth to deal with the things.
While I'm not American, I will say that an extra 3kg or so is an inconvenience compared to just under 1kg. It's not as if we're all suddenly lacking the muscle mass to carry a 15" machine or that we're so lazy we don't want to expend the extra energy, it's that if you want a machine with you all the time then it will get irritating to carry the larger one - the smaller and lighter the machine, the more likely it is to become something you carry everywhere and thus have whenever you need it (or, to put it another way, if you know you're going to potentially need a laptop at any time while you're out, the eee is going to get much less annoying to carry all day every day).
NB: if you don't know the meaning of the terms 'ADSL' and 'broadband', Slashdot is not a good place to post.
I like OSX, and to me it's worth the premium (for now, at least) that I pay on the overall package. I'm sure many others agree. That means if they just took the Mac Mini's guts, threw them in a small tower with a 3.5" hard drive and a PCI-E slot and sold them for the same price as the Mini, I'd buy them. As far as I can see that would have a slightly bigger profit margin for Apple - fewer heat issues, less hassle dealing with cramped motherboards and the ability to use cheaper hard drives. They wouldn't have to compete with Dell and accept tiny margins because they have something to set them apart from the commodity machines that are sold more or less on price alone.
That said, I suppose they are playing the game and they're doing it well - they (rightly) bet that a user like myself, who would have bought that machine I described plus a decent 24" LCD, will instead buy the iMac (which I did) essentially purchasing the monitor from them too. Those who wouldn't buy the iMac will stick with the Mini. Net gain for Apple, some level of irritation for the customers, but not quite enough to put them off next time. Apple wins, but I don't quite feel like I've lost.
I do find their limits to be quite fair, but there is (as far as I am aware) no system for warnings as the limits are being reached. They do provide usage data for that month on your user account page, though. They don't cap your rate after you hit the limit, but to be honest I'm glad about that - I'd rather just get an email and take it upon myself to level off that month. Basically the reason I mentioned it is because the charges are treated more as a penalty than as a fee for a little extra usage, meaning it's very much in your interests not to reach them. That said, I am still very pleased with them overall, and I'm happy to recommend them.
Unless I'm reading something very wrongly, holy crap they're expensive! I know you have to pay for good service, but those per GB charges are insane. You'll certainly pay more for a 'real' connection than you would if you went with TalkTalk or Sky, but you don't have to take it to the extremes of what these people are charging.
I'm pleased overall with my Entanet DSL. All the resellers seem to offer the same price packages, so I use UKFSN (no association with them other than as a customer) who use all of their profits to fund UK free software projects. The business packages are reasonably priced and seem to be the closest thing you can get to a direct, neutral, non 'managed' connection these days. They also offer genuine unlimited packages, although the prices might be a bit of a shock to people used to the so-called unlimited offerings from other ISPs.
The one thing that I would fault them on is their data transfer allowance system. Basically the penalty fees for going a few GB over the limit will add about 50% to that month's bill.
I think that people are making far too much of an issue of the whole thing. Digital tuner boxes are cheap, simple and easy to get hold of. I know we're on a slightly different system here, but they start at about £10 which is equivalent to $20, half the value of the vouchers that your government is dishing out for the switchover! A product that will need a £10 upgrade for some users (i.e. those without cable or satellite) really does not need to be banned from import.
Absolutely agreed. I can totally see the market for laptops that'll run games, Photoshop and the like but I'm not in that market - I'll do those things on a bigger screen for less money with my desktop because I don't need to do them on the move.
What I want from a laptop is small size and weight - something I can carry everywhere just to get the odd bit of work done, browse the web or check my email. The system requirements for that really aren't changing that greatly any time soon. Previously there was no such thing as a small cheap laptop, you couldn't trade off power for price and you simply couldn't buy a small machine for anything like the same money as a 15" one. I'm exceedingly happy that there is now a machine that fits my needs, and I can't wait until the various 8.9" models come on sale because I'm buying one in a snap.
Can that be considered a rickroll even if it happened inside my head?