>> Spherical aberration causes distortion of the image due to the lens surface not being perfectly spherical, and thus the focal length varying over the surface. It can only be corrected by grinding lenses well.
Minor correction: In fact, spherical aberration comes about because the lens is spherical, not because it's aspherical. Optically, a sphere is not a perfect lens--its focal length varies slightly over the surface (this is either a second or third order effect which is ignored in most calculations at school and college level).
However, to calculate what shape lens would give a perfect image for a given lens geometry (meaning the overall setup of lenses in the camera, not the shape of each individual lens) is very difficult - it's an inductive process, so has to be done basically by trial and error. Some lens manufacturers do sell aspherical lenses developed to overcome the shortcomings of spherical optics, but I'm not sure they're really any better.
I agree - the S1 is a great machine for the price. Picture quality is excellent, it's bright enough to throw a decent picture on a white wall (remember, a projector screen will set you back a few hundred bucks more), no rainbow effect (since it's LCD). It's a bit bigger than I expected but since I use it for home theatre, not as a corporate road warrior, that doesn't matter much.
Or possibly they folded because that is one of the dumbest business models ever invented. The cost of delivery was probably several times the cost of the items being delivered. The target audience was miniscule - how many people in SF have the midnight munchies? For cookies and milk? (is this proof of the infantilisation of US culture?) And couldn't satisfy their craving more easily by going to 7-11 (or raiding a nearby kitchen, if in college)? Trust me, trying to capture the office market was not their biggest error.
>>Thinking humans can make or break it is arrogant and egotistical, to say the least.
And assuming that humans can't is what, exactly? Global warming is not a scare story made up by environmentalists, you know. It's the leading scientific theory of how the climate currently behaves. Surely the least arrogant and egotistical way of looking at things is to build a model based or our best understanding of how the climate works, and see the effect of adding CO2? (answer: global warming) Maybe the models are wrong - but I'd put my faith in them over 'elementary school biology' (or do you have the calculations to back up your claim).
Climatologists are aware that plants absorb CO2. They're also aware that most ecosystems are carbon-neutral (because when the plant/plankton dies, it decays). Unless you have plans to increas the planet's green cover, this will have little effect. Of course, increased desertification - a probable result of warming - would have the opposite effect. They're also aware that warming threatens to release masses of greenhouse gasses trapped under permafrost in Siberia, which would accelerate the effect. They're also aware that the earth went through a little ice-age recently. It's not disputed that the earth is going through a naturally warming phase. But the rate of warming is much faster than predicted because of that alone - and fits in well with predictions based on CO2 emissions.
The fact is that recent climate models, based on our best understanding of the science, do a pretty good job of explaining the earth's climate over the past century, and they indicate that CO2 plays a major role in recent warming, and that without a reduction in CO2 levels, warming will increase. I, for one, am happy to follow the scientific evidence.
Firstly, there's no constitutional bar against a candidate withdrawing and handing the office over. Until the electoral college meets, the "winning" candidate has no constitutional status. So all he has to do is withdraw his candidacy from the electoral college. Alternatively, he can ask his electors to instead vote for the other guy. Perfectly constitutional, and honourable to boot.
But in any case, you totally miss my main point. Put aside reverence for the constitution as it happened to be written for one minute and think: wouldn't it be better to have a system for electing the president in which the person who got the most votes won?
People say that such a system would hand power to the big states, elections would be decided by the voters in NY and California. To which I say, so what? The president's powers are the same whatever state you live. The current system, giving more weight to a voter from Rhode Island than to one from Calfornia, is not that different from the old system in which the weight of your vote depended on what colour you were. How can you justify discriminating against someone based on where they live?
Don't put any more faith in Wikipedia than you would put in/. as a source of info. They're mostly used by the same crowd!
>>It has not been proven yet because quantum mechanics is not fully understood yet.
I'd argue that quantum mechanics is as well understood (by physicists) as any physical theory. Aspects of it remain unclear - mostly how it interacts with gravity - but nothing which would affect the operation of quantum cryptography, which works on principles understood for 70 years. Your argument is akin to criticising a mathematical proof on the grounds that mathematics is not fully understood.
>>Furthermore, this is really just a Quantum Key exchange. So tack on whatever protocol you wish to use once you have the key.
Right. And the one-time pad used in QC is an unbreakable protocol. Thus if you have unbreakably secure key exchange, you can create an unbreakable system.
>>Also please note, the quantum transmission is not even "secure." Its just that if anyone but you reads it, you are secure in the knowledge that you will know about it.
Right, but think this through. As you say, QC is really just key exchange. No message is sent over the quantum channel - just the key. Once you have the key, you encrypt the message and transmit it publicly. If you discover that the key has been compromised, you don't send the message. Of course that means that a determined eavesdropper could prevent you from ever exchanging a secure key (and so stop you sending the message), but that's the trade off for being know how secure your key is. Any key exchange system can be compromised - the difference with QC is that it can't be compromised without you knowing.
>>Its just not what its being marketed as.
Again, you're right up to a point - but the problem is with the marketing, not the science. The point about QC is not that it is 100% secure. In reality, no system is 100% secure. The great advance of QC is that it allows you to place an accurate lower bound on how secure your encryption is--as part of the key exchange, you can tell with precision the proportion of the key that might have been compromised. This is in stark contrast with other cryptography schemes, where you rely on the inherent difficulty of the scheme to crack but can never tell if it has been cracked or not.
The more secure you want the system to be, the longer you're going to have to spend on key exchange. In practice, 100% security would need an infinitely long time to generate the key. But you're never going to need 100% security. Say you achieve 99% - that means the eavesdropper knows 1% of your one-time pad. So he can decode 1 in every 100 bits you're sending, scattered randomly throughout your message. Unless you're repeatedly sending the same message, an eavesdropper is unlikely to get any useful information out of that. If you are sending the same message 100 times, then you wait until your key is 99.99%, say, and then transmit. That's the beauty of QC - that you can be as secure as you need to be in practice, not that you can be 100% secure in theory.
He may have been elected according the constitution, if you accept the Supreme Court's judgment. He was definitely not elected in the sense that more votes were cast -- by the people, not the electoral college - for his opponent.
All the Supreme Court can do is apply the constitution. All those 9 judges could say was whether the President was elected in accordance with the law. They did not have the power to say "the president was elected according to the law, but a law which allows the guy who came second in the popular vote to become president is seriously broken".
I presume you supported Bush. So let me ask, what would your response be if Gore had been declared the legal victor but Bush had received more votes? Would you really have rolled over and said nothing?
I actually find it incredible that anyone can willingly govern knowing that they lost the popular vote. Surely a politician with a conscience (if such exists) would say, "I may be the legal victor but I accept the will of the people, and cede my victory to the man whom the people chose"? But I don't suppose any political leader of any party in any country would ever do that.
>>A liquid conducts heat EXTREMELY well. You're thinking in terms of a solid, where atoms are fixed and have to transfer energy to each other. However, in a liquid, if one portion of the liquid is heated, this creates a stream of molecules in the liquid to disperse the heat. The heated molecules will actively move away from the heat source, giving room to cooler liquid molecules, which is a hell of a lot more efficient than normal solid-state heat conductivity.
This reasoning is plausible, simple, and absolutely false. Your explanation would suggest that gases conduct heat even better than liquid, because molecules in a gas actively move away faster than those in a liquid. Or how about a vacuum - all those infra-red photons, they move away really fast.
The best heat conductors are actually solids, because what's important for heat conduction is not how quickly the hot molecules move away, but how quickly they pass on their heat to neighboring molecules. And that tends to happen much faster in solids (the denser the better) than in any liquid or fluid. Each molecule or atom stays in the same place, but it passes on its heat to its neighbours via lattice vibrations or (in a metal) free electrons. You know what's the best heat conductor known to man? Diamond. Not exactly a liquid.
So why do most cooling systems use fluids? Not because the fluid itself is a good heat conductor, but because you can actively pump the fluid around to speed up the heat transfer from one place to another. Leave the cooling effect to molecular diffusion and you might as well give up.
>> As with all products, no matter who makes them, you should probably buy a warranty if none is provided.
As with all products, no matter who makes them, you should remember that they are legally obliged to sell you properly designed, working goods, and that if the thing breaks down because of a design fault or shoddy manufacturing, you have a right to your money back whether or not you have a warranty.
Also remember that manufacturers make money (lots and lots of money) out of warranties. They do this on the insurance principle: if someone's machine breaks, then it will cost more to fix/replace it than the warranty cost. But for every Joe whose machine breaks, hundreds will have paid for the warranty and never use it.
Now we're not talking about a car, or a central heating system, or something else that costs thousands of bucks to buy and would cost thousands to fix if it ever went wrong. We're talking about a $250 consumer gadget that probably has a working life of 2-3 years. Before buying any warranty, ask yourself: if this thing broke down, could I afford to replace it/fix it? If the answer is yes, don't buy a warranty, just buy another or fix it in the unlikely event it breaks down. 99 times out of 100, you'll have no problems, and what you spend to fix the 100th will be far less than what you would have spent on 100 different warranties.
One of the alarming things about slashdot is the way it really brings out the bigots in the community.
Story about a sicilian village? Sure, they must be a bunch of superstitious peasants with a mental age of 11. Story about women? Cue for side-splitting 'jokes' about how dumb they are with computers and or crude sexual innuendo. (and then the authors wonder why they can't get a girlfriend). Story about India? Racial stereotypes alive and well.
I'm not worried so much about the existence of these posts. The attraction of/. is that anybody can write anything. What worries me is the number of them that get modded up, which suggests that there's a strong undercurrent of slashdot opinion who sympathise with them. I don't think it's ideological, but there seem to be an awful lot of people out there who have never really looked outside their geek ghettos to try and understand the wider world.
What's the problem? You bought the machine from the store. They made a profit selling you the machine. Isn't it immoral for them to make money selling machines that don't work? And if it's not their fault that the machine didn't work, well then they can sue Apple for supplying them with a dodgy machine.
I don't know about NZ and the US, but in England it's only been a year since they passed a law requiring manufacturers to stand by their warranties. Previously the law was that the customer only has a legal relationship with the store - and given that US consumer protection is generally weaker than in the UK, I expect that's still the case in the US. (Of course this doesn't apply if you purchase an extended warranty from the manufacturer, since then you have a legal conract with them.)
>> And what the *fsck* does it mean, even if the data has a Gaussian distribution?
that's what wikipedia is for:)
it's a measure of the width of the distribution. Given a gaussian distribution, a random measurement will occur within one standard deviation of the mean with a probability of around 68%. Or to put it the other way round, if you have data and are trying to calculate the distribution, there's about a 68% chance that the true value of the mean falls within 1 s.d. of the value you calculated.
If you don't have a gaussian distribution, you can still calculate a standard deviation but it will not have the same meaning with respect to the probability of you having got the right mean.
This is of particular relevance to spreadsheets, since they're often used to do calculations on financial data such as stock prices and most financial data is not gaussian--it's 'log normal', meaning that the logarithm of the data values are gaussian, but not the data itself. So most people doing standard deviation calculations on such data are probably completely misinterpreting the results...
Do you really know what the standard deviation is? For example, you know that most standard tools for calculating standard deviation it assume the data has a Gaussian distribution. But what if your data poisson distributed, or hypergeometric, or maxwell-boltzmann...Of course if you're taking the standard distribution of a set of averages then you're safe because the distribution of the mean is almost always Gaussian. but then, you knew that, right?
The real problem with statistics is that everyone thinks they understand them, and almost nobody does (including me, the above is a very hazy memory from high school and my first year of uni).
'Fraid your friend's not very original. The original quote is from Oscar Wilde: "a cynic is a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing"(
Don't forget that whenever you buy anything that goes wrong, you're primary comeback is against the store that sold it to you, not the manufacturer. Your contract is with the store, and part of a consumer contract is that the goods have to be of merchantable quality. It sounds to me as though your powerbook fails that test. So forget Apple - take the machine back to the store where you bought it and tell them that unless THEY replace the computer, you'll sue them for breach of contract.
>>It seems to me that the way political parties function in the USA is pretty much a continuation of English tradition. A rather substantial part of the representative democracies in the world have more then 2 major parties, and do indeed need coalition governments.
>I'm sorry, but when you say something like this it makes it appear as if you don't understand the US system very well. We do not have a parliamentary system.
The grandparent said 'a continuation of English tradition'. So go back to the 18th century and see what the English system was then. You'll find that it was almost identical to the US set-up, with the exception that the head of state is an elected president rather than a hereditary monarch. The parliamentary system you refer to - with the Prime Minister and the government all being members of parliament, and the government having effective control of parliament - only developed towards the end of the century. Indeed, the post of Prime Minister was never formally created. The only 'constitutional' positions in the British parliament are the speakers of the two houses, as in the US.
It's interesting to speculate why the US did not develop a similar parliamentary system. There was nothing to stop it: it's still the case in Britain that the governmnet is formally appointed by the head of state, and it's just convention that the monarch always follows the Prime Minister's advice. And the monarch still has veto power over any legislation passed by parliament - it's just been 300 years since it was used. There doesn't seem to be anything in the US constitution that would prevent a parliamentary system from working.
Presumably part of the reason is that with an elected president there's less reason for the legislature to use its 'democratic legitimacy' as a reason to abrogate power to itself. But many democracies combine a parliamentary system with an elected president. I think the real reason is the exaggerated respect for the president and the constitution displayed by most Americans: there's a real sense that 'if it wasn't in the founding father's original vision, it shouldn't happen'. That probably prevented the legislature from ever taking the upper hand in the popular imagination.
The US system has advantages, but its failure to develop parliamentary aspects leads to difficulties, especially when the government is trying to undertake any real reform. When you have too many checks and balances, the outcome is often extreme resistance to change.
>>For an American example being that America was founded on the idea of freedom
Freedom? The founding (and enduring) ideology of the US was tax avoidance. Remember, the cry was "no taxation without representation". Not "no government without representation". And pretty much every election since has been won on that platform. The federal government can trash healthcare, social security, foreign policy etc, but so long as it cuts taxes -- well, that's OK.
>>Why should I have to defend my beliefs to you or anyone else? Why can't my political beliefs be simply none of your business?
Excuse me, but political beliefs are different from religious beliefs, sexual orientation etc. The latter are properly private and need concern no-one else. But your political beliefs, if enacted, will result in changes to policies and laws that will affect EVERYONE. So long as you don't act on them, then OK, they too are private. But if you're giving money to a campaign to bring about those changes, then yes, you should be ready to defend those views in public.
There's another equally important reason for campaign contributions to be public. Many people and businesses use political contributions as a way of buying access to politicians. It's essential to know who's giving what to whom, or you end up with a world in which money is more important than votes. (Or maybe that's already happened - because the rules are too easy to get around.)
Last time I heard that, it was a lawyer joke. Indeed, the only change is to substitute "you must be a lawyer" on the third line and "you must be a client" on the 6th. I guess it could be adapted to most other advice-giving professions...
simple. The stockholders own the company and the purpose of the company is not to pay its employees, but to create value for stockholders. As well as dumping the stock if they don't like the way it's going, they can fire the board and the CEO. Plus if a company isn't looking after its owner's interests, the next time it needs to raise capital via a stock issue, it's going to be in trouble.
Frankly, Nintendo probably would have disappeared a few years ago without the GameBoy. And there's no doubt that Nintendo is only a fraction as powerful as it was when the GameBoy was released - back then, the NES was the top selling games system in the world.
To get back on-topic, I hope Apple isn't betting the company on the iPod, because I don't see a long-term future in standalone music players. I'm in the market for a new cellphone and find that even on the cheapest contract deals I can get a free phone with a built-in MP3/AAC player. Some even include video players. OK so most have limited flash memory for now, but it can't be long until they start integrating gigabyte drives. I'd also be willing to bet that phone companies will soon create music stores that will allow people to download tracks to their phone direct without having to go through a PC. When that happens, then unless Apple has an iPhone up its sleeve and a deal extend iTunes to become a mobile service, it can kiss its music business byebyes.
What you've said is fine for privately owned companies. If the owner's making money, he's happy. For public companies such as Apple, though, its a different story. Public companies have to keep their stockholders happy. That means it's not enough to turn a profit: you've got to be turning a profit that (in percentage terms) is at least as big as your rivals. You've got to grow at least as fast as your rivals. Otherwise, shareholders will dump your stock and invest in your rivals.
Slashdot Mirror
"Information is painted directly onto the retina"
You mean the light comes into the eye, gets focussed by the cornea and lens, and forms an image on the retina? Wow, that's a new way of seeing things.
>> Spherical aberration causes distortion of the image due to the lens surface not being perfectly spherical, and thus the focal length varying over the surface. It can only be corrected by grinding lenses well.
Minor correction: In fact, spherical aberration comes about because the lens is spherical, not because it's aspherical. Optically, a sphere is not a perfect lens--its focal length varies slightly over the surface (this is either a second or third order effect which is ignored in most calculations at school and college level).
However, to calculate what shape lens would give a perfect image for a given lens geometry (meaning the overall setup of lenses in the camera, not the shape of each individual lens) is very difficult - it's an inductive process, so has to be done basically by trial and error. Some lens manufacturers do sell aspherical lenses developed to overcome the shortcomings of spherical optics, but I'm not sure they're really any better.
I agree - the S1 is a great machine for the price. Picture quality is excellent, it's bright enough to throw a decent picture on a white wall (remember, a projector screen will set you back a few hundred bucks more), no rainbow effect (since it's LCD). It's a bit bigger than I expected but since I use it for home theatre, not as a corporate road warrior, that doesn't matter much.
Or possibly they folded because that is one of the dumbest business models ever invented. The cost of delivery was probably several times the cost of the items being delivered. The target audience was miniscule - how many people in SF have the midnight munchies? For cookies and milk? (is this proof of the infantilisation of US culture?) And couldn't satisfy their craving more easily by going to 7-11 (or raiding a nearby kitchen, if in college)? Trust me, trying to capture the office market was not their biggest error.
>>Thinking humans can make or break it is arrogant and egotistical, to say the least.
And assuming that humans can't is what, exactly? Global warming is not a scare story made up by environmentalists, you know. It's the leading scientific theory of how the climate currently behaves. Surely the least arrogant and egotistical way of looking at things is to build a model based or our best understanding of how the climate works, and see the effect of adding CO2? (answer: global warming) Maybe the models are wrong - but I'd put my faith in them over 'elementary school biology' (or do you have the calculations to back up your claim).
Climatologists are aware that plants absorb CO2. They're also aware that most ecosystems are carbon-neutral (because when the plant/plankton dies, it decays). Unless you have plans to increas the planet's green cover, this will have little effect. Of course, increased desertification - a probable result of warming - would have the opposite effect. They're also aware that warming threatens to release masses of greenhouse gasses trapped under permafrost in Siberia, which would accelerate the effect. They're also aware that the earth went through a little ice-age recently. It's not disputed that the earth is going through a naturally warming phase. But the rate of warming is much faster than predicted because of that alone - and fits in well with predictions based on CO2 emissions.
The fact is that recent climate models, based on our best understanding of the science, do a pretty good job of explaining the earth's climate over the past century, and they indicate that CO2 plays a major role in recent warming, and that without a reduction in CO2 levels, warming will increase. I, for one, am happy to follow the scientific evidence.
Firstly, there's no constitutional bar against a candidate withdrawing and handing the office over. Until the electoral college meets, the "winning" candidate has no constitutional status. So all he has to do is withdraw his candidacy from the electoral college. Alternatively, he can ask his electors to instead vote for the other guy. Perfectly constitutional, and honourable to boot.
But in any case, you totally miss my main point. Put aside reverence for the constitution as it happened to be written for one minute and think: wouldn't it be better to have a system for electing the president in which the person who got the most votes won?
People say that such a system would hand power to the big states, elections would be decided by the voters in NY and California. To which I say, so what? The president's powers are the same whatever state you live. The current system, giving more weight to a voter from Rhode Island than to one from Calfornia, is not that different from the old system in which the weight of your vote depended on what colour you were. How can you justify discriminating against someone based on where they live?
Don't put any more faith in Wikipedia than you would put in /. as a source of info. They're mostly used by the same crowd!
>>It has not been proven yet because quantum mechanics is not fully understood yet.
I'd argue that quantum mechanics is as well understood (by physicists) as any physical theory. Aspects of it remain unclear - mostly how it interacts with gravity - but nothing which would affect the operation of quantum cryptography, which works on principles understood for 70 years.
Your argument is akin to criticising a mathematical proof on the grounds that mathematics is not fully understood.
>>Furthermore, this is really just a Quantum Key exchange. So tack on whatever protocol you wish to use once you have the key.
Right. And the one-time pad used in QC is an unbreakable protocol. Thus if you have unbreakably secure key exchange, you can create an unbreakable system.
>>Also please note, the quantum transmission is not even "secure." Its just that if anyone but you reads it, you are secure in the knowledge that you will know about it.
Right, but think this through. As you say, QC is really just key exchange. No message is sent over the quantum channel - just the key. Once you have the key, you encrypt the message and transmit it publicly. If you discover that the key has been compromised, you don't send the message. Of course that means that a determined eavesdropper could prevent you from ever exchanging a secure key (and so stop you sending the message), but that's the trade off for being know how secure your key is. Any key exchange system can be compromised - the difference with QC is that it can't be compromised without you knowing.
>>Its just not what its being marketed as.
Again, you're right up to a point - but the problem is with the marketing, not the science. The point about QC is not that it is 100% secure. In reality, no system is 100% secure. The great advance of QC is that it allows you to place an accurate lower bound on how secure your encryption is--as part of the key exchange, you can tell with precision the proportion of the key that might have been compromised. This is in stark contrast with other cryptography schemes, where you rely on the inherent difficulty of the scheme to crack but can never tell if it has been cracked or not.
The more secure you want the system to be, the longer you're going to have to spend on key exchange. In practice, 100% security would need an infinitely long time to generate the key. But you're never going to need 100% security. Say you achieve 99% - that means the eavesdropper knows 1% of your one-time pad. So he can decode 1 in every 100 bits you're sending, scattered randomly throughout your message. Unless you're repeatedly sending the same message, an eavesdropper is unlikely to get any useful information out of that. If you are sending the same message 100 times, then you wait until your key is 99.99%, say, and then transmit. That's the beauty of QC - that you can be as secure as you need to be in practice, not that you can be 100% secure in theory.
He may have been elected according the constitution, if you accept the Supreme Court's judgment. He was definitely not elected in the sense that more votes were cast -- by the people, not the electoral college - for his opponent.
All the Supreme Court can do is apply the constitution. All those 9 judges could say was whether the President was elected in accordance with the law. They did not have the power to say "the president was elected according to the law, but a law which allows the guy who came second in the popular vote to become president is seriously broken".
I presume you supported Bush. So let me ask, what would your response be if Gore had been declared the legal victor but Bush had received more votes? Would you really have rolled over and said nothing?
I actually find it incredible that anyone can willingly govern knowing that they lost the popular vote. Surely a politician with a conscience (if such exists) would say, "I may be the legal victor but I accept the will of the people, and cede my victory to the man whom the people chose"? But I don't suppose any political leader of any party in any country would ever do that.
>>A liquid conducts heat EXTREMELY well. You're thinking in terms of a solid, where atoms are fixed and have to transfer energy to each other. However, in a liquid, if one portion of the liquid is heated, this creates a stream of molecules in the liquid to disperse the heat. The heated molecules will actively move away from the heat source, giving room to cooler liquid molecules, which is a hell of a lot more efficient than normal solid-state heat conductivity.
This reasoning is plausible, simple, and absolutely false. Your explanation would suggest that gases conduct heat even better than liquid, because molecules in a gas actively move away faster than those in a liquid. Or how about a vacuum - all those infra-red photons, they move away really fast.
The best heat conductors are actually solids, because what's important for heat conduction is not how quickly the hot molecules move away, but how quickly they pass on their heat to neighboring molecules. And that tends to happen much faster in solids (the denser the better) than in any liquid or fluid. Each molecule or atom stays in the same place, but it passes on its heat to its neighbours via lattice vibrations or (in a metal) free electrons. You know what's the best heat conductor known to man? Diamond. Not exactly a liquid.
So why do most cooling systems use fluids? Not because the fluid itself is a good heat conductor, but because you can actively pump the fluid around to speed up the heat transfer from one place to another. Leave the cooling effect to molecular diffusion and you might as well give up.
>> As with all products, no matter who makes them, you should probably buy a warranty if none is provided.
As with all products, no matter who makes them, you should remember that they are legally obliged to sell you properly designed, working goods, and that if the thing breaks down because of a design fault or shoddy manufacturing, you have a right to your money back whether or not you have a warranty.
Also remember that manufacturers make money (lots and lots of money) out of warranties. They do this on the insurance principle: if someone's machine breaks, then it will cost more to fix/replace it than the warranty cost. But for every Joe whose machine breaks, hundreds will have paid for the warranty and never use it.
Now we're not talking about a car, or a central heating system, or something else that costs thousands of bucks to buy and would cost thousands to fix if it ever went wrong. We're talking about a $250 consumer gadget that probably has a working life of 2-3 years. Before buying any warranty, ask yourself: if this thing broke down, could I afford to replace it/fix it? If the answer is yes, don't buy a warranty, just buy another or fix it in the unlikely event it breaks down. 99 times out of 100, you'll have no problems, and what you spend to fix the 100th will be far less than what you would have spent on 100 different warranties.
One of the alarming things about slashdot is the way it really brings out the bigots in the community.
Story about a sicilian village? Sure, they must be a bunch of superstitious peasants with a mental age of 11. Story about women? Cue for side-splitting 'jokes' about how dumb they are with computers and or crude sexual innuendo. (and then the authors wonder why they can't get a girlfriend). Story about India? Racial stereotypes alive and well.
I'm not worried so much about the existence of these posts. The attraction of
What's the problem? You bought the machine from the store. They made a profit selling you the machine. Isn't it immoral for them to make money selling machines that don't work? And if it's not their fault that the machine didn't work, well then they can sue Apple for supplying them with a dodgy machine.
I don't know about NZ and the US, but in England it's only been a year since they passed a law requiring manufacturers to stand by their warranties. Previously the law was that the customer only has a legal relationship with the store - and given that US consumer protection is generally weaker than in the UK, I expect that's still the case in the US. (Of course this doesn't apply if you purchase an extended warranty from the manufacturer, since then you have a legal conract with them.)
>> And what the *fsck* does it mean, even if the data has a Gaussian distribution?
:)
that's what wikipedia is for
it's a measure of the width of the distribution. Given a gaussian distribution, a random measurement will occur within one standard deviation of the mean with a probability of around 68%. Or to put it the other way round, if you have data and are trying to calculate the distribution, there's about a 68% chance that the true value of the mean falls within 1 s.d. of the value you calculated.
If you don't have a gaussian distribution, you can still calculate a standard deviation but it will not have the same meaning with respect to the probability of you having got the right mean.
This is of particular relevance to spreadsheets, since they're often used to do calculations on financial data such as stock prices and most financial data is not gaussian--it's 'log normal', meaning that the logarithm of the data values are gaussian, but not the data itself. So most people doing standard deviation calculations on such data are probably completely misinterpreting the results...
Do you really know what the standard deviation is? For example, you know that most standard tools for calculating standard deviation it assume the data has a Gaussian distribution. But what if your data poisson distributed, or hypergeometric, or maxwell-boltzmann...Of course if you're taking the standard distribution of a set of averages then you're safe because the distribution of the mean is almost always Gaussian. but then, you knew that, right?
The real problem with statistics is that everyone thinks they understand them, and almost nobody does (including me, the above is a very hazy memory from high school and my first year of uni).
'Fraid your friend's not very original. The original quote is from Oscar Wilde: "a cynic is a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing"(
Don't forget that whenever you buy anything that goes wrong, you're primary comeback is against the store that sold it to you, not the manufacturer. Your contract is with the store, and part of a consumer contract is that the goods have to be of merchantable quality. It sounds to me as though your powerbook fails that test. So forget Apple - take the machine back to the store where you bought it and tell them that unless THEY replace the computer, you'll sue them for breach of contract.
>>You've never had a brownout? Power surge? Power spike? Fluctuations that shut down your computer if it's on, and start your computer when it's off?
Not since I left America and moved to London... it's amazing the shit that they call electricity in the states
>>It seems to me that the way political parties function in the USA is pretty much a continuation of English tradition. A rather substantial part of the representative democracies in the world have more then 2 major parties, and do indeed need coalition governments.
>I'm sorry, but when you say something like this it makes it appear as if you don't understand the US system very well. We do not have a parliamentary system.
The grandparent said 'a continuation of English tradition'. So go back to the 18th century and see what the English system was then. You'll find that it was almost identical to the US set-up, with the exception that the head of state is an elected president rather than a hereditary monarch. The parliamentary system you refer to - with the Prime Minister and the government all being members of parliament, and the government having effective control of parliament - only developed towards the end of the century. Indeed, the post of Prime Minister was never formally created. The only 'constitutional' positions in the British parliament are the speakers of the two houses, as in the US.
It's interesting to speculate why the US did not develop a similar parliamentary system. There was nothing to stop it: it's still the case in Britain that the governmnet is formally appointed by the head of state, and it's just convention that the monarch always follows the Prime Minister's advice. And the monarch still has veto power over any legislation passed by parliament - it's just been 300 years since it was used. There doesn't seem to be anything in the US constitution that would prevent a parliamentary system from working.
Presumably part of the reason is that with an elected president there's less reason for the legislature to use its 'democratic legitimacy' as a reason to abrogate power to itself. But many democracies combine a parliamentary system with an elected president. I think the real reason is the exaggerated respect for the president and the constitution displayed by most Americans: there's a real sense that 'if it wasn't in the founding father's original vision, it shouldn't happen'. That probably prevented the legislature from ever taking the upper hand in the popular imagination.
The US system has advantages, but its failure to develop parliamentary aspects leads to difficulties, especially when the government is trying to undertake any real reform. When you have too many checks and balances, the outcome is often extreme resistance to change.
>>For an American example being that America was founded on the idea of freedom
Freedom? The founding (and enduring) ideology of the US was tax avoidance. Remember, the cry was "no taxation without representation". Not "no government without representation". And pretty much every election since has been won on that platform. The federal government can trash healthcare, social security, foreign policy etc, but so long as it cuts taxes -- well, that's OK.
>>Why should I have to defend my beliefs to you or anyone else? Why can't my political beliefs be simply none of your business?
Excuse me, but political beliefs are different from religious beliefs, sexual orientation etc. The latter are properly private and need concern no-one else. But your political beliefs, if enacted, will result in changes to policies and laws that will affect EVERYONE. So long as you don't act on them, then OK, they too are private. But if you're giving money to a campaign to bring about those changes, then yes, you should be ready to defend those views in public.
There's another equally important reason for campaign contributions to be public. Many people and businesses use political contributions as a way of buying access to politicians. It's essential to know who's giving what to whom, or you end up with a world in which money is more important than votes. (Or maybe that's already happened - because the rules are too easy to get around.)
Last time I heard that, it was a lawyer joke. Indeed, the only change is to substitute "you must be a lawyer" on the third line and "you must be a client" on the 6th. I guess it could be adapted to most other advice-giving professions...
damn...looks like I'll have to throw out that tinfoil hat.
simple. The stockholders own the company and the purpose of the company is not to pay its employees, but to create value for stockholders. As well as dumping the stock if they don't like the way it's going, they can fire the board and the CEO. Plus if a company isn't looking after its owner's interests, the next time it needs to raise capital via a stock issue, it's going to be in trouble.
Frankly, Nintendo probably would have disappeared a few years ago without the GameBoy. And there's no doubt that Nintendo is only a fraction as powerful as it was when the GameBoy was released - back then, the NES was the top selling games system in the world.
To get back on-topic, I hope Apple isn't betting the company on the iPod, because I don't see a long-term future in standalone music players. I'm in the market for a new cellphone and find that even on the cheapest contract deals I can get a free phone with a built-in MP3/AAC player. Some even include video players. OK so most have limited flash memory for now, but it can't be long until they start integrating gigabyte drives. I'd also be willing to bet that phone companies will soon create music stores that will allow people to download tracks to their phone direct without having to go through a PC. When that happens, then unless Apple has an iPhone up its sleeve and a deal extend iTunes to become a mobile service, it can kiss its music business byebyes.
What you've said is fine for privately owned companies. If the owner's making money, he's happy. For public companies such as Apple, though, its a different story. Public companies have to keep their stockholders happy. That means it's not enough to turn a profit: you've got to be turning a profit that (in percentage terms) is at least as big as your rivals. You've got to grow at least as fast as your rivals. Otherwise, shareholders will dump your stock and invest in your rivals.