Price isn't the only factor people care about. In a laptop, people will pay more for something that is lighter, and uses less battery life. (Just look at how many people purchase iPod Nanos instead of larger hard drive based iPods.)
As others have noted, the rewrite issue is improving daily. I remember slashdot posts like yours from a year or so back that used "10,000 rewrites" as the scare figure. In addition, OSes could be reorganized to minimize the issue. (For instance, just adding more RAM reduces the amount of swapping that is done.) If you look at what is stored on people's hard drives today, the vast majority is stuff that sites for long periods of time. People don't reorganize their MP3 collection 500,000 times.
Exactly half of people make less than the median income (by definition) and since intelligence is on a bell curve, exactly half of people have average intelligence or less.
It's perfectly rational to think that it might just be luck. If, for example, the chance of life appearing on a potentially habitable planet is 1 in 10^16 and there are only 1x10^15 planets, then it would be pure good luck that there's even on intelligent race in this universe.
Not that I think that's the case, but until we have more actual evidence, it's all just pure guesswork.
Yes...the answer to the question Fermi asked is perhaps that "they" are scattered through the universe, each happy in small, self-sustaining groups of a few star systems, happy to let the rest of the universe lay fallow.
Yes, however, intelligence almost certainly has a cost, if nothing else in the calories required to support it, so unless there is a benefit to balance out the cost it'd be selected against.
This assumes that intelligent species continue to breed exponentially after gaining interstellar flight.
Perhaps the answer to the "Fermi Paradox" is that intelligent species gain complete control over population expansion before they gain interstellar flight and simply don't need to "conquer the galaxy". It may be that intelligent species simply don't bother expanding after expanding enough to avoid single-planet dooms.
I would be stunned if the credit card processors let Amazon do that. Amazon also has a contract with the credit card processor. That contract almost certainly lays out in very explicit terms when exactly Amazon is allowed to run a charge.
While it is almost certainly not moral to take advantage of Amazon's mistake, I am fairly certain (IANAL) that it is completely illegal for Amazon to charge a credit card without a customer's authorization. They could probably legally try to bill you for the goods in this case (I'm not sure of the law) but companies are only supposed to charge cards when explicitly authorized to. Anyone caught in this can probably dispute the charges with their credit card company and get them reversed, and if this is widespread enough, Amazon's bank may well fine them for it.
Did you know that in the United States there is no law that says a movie theater has to keep a kid out of an R rated movie? Did you know that in the United States, there's no law that says a movie studio must have their movie rated, or that theaters can only show rated movies? There's no legal binding behind the movie rating system at all.
Can your five year old walk into "Saw III"?
Probably not...just because the government isn't involved doesn't mean that anarchy reigns.
The problem isn't the ESRB. The ESRB works perfectly fine. I play lots of games, and I don't think I've ever run into one that was rated incorrectly. There is absolutely no evidence at all that game designers are trying to cheat somehow to get "better" ratings.
The problem is that many parents ignore the ESRB and buy their children any ol' crap. (Just like many parents let their kids watch any ol' movie.) For every clerk who sells a kid an "M" game, there's a hundred parents who buy their kid an "M" game.
Attempts to "improve" the ESRB are met with derision and anger because the ESRB is just fine, and these attempts are almost invariably either pandering to social conservatives or blatant attempts to force game designers to make no adult games at all.
That's not true. In 1900, the Republicans were socially *liberal* and fiscally conservative. (According to the standards of the day, of course.) In 1900, nearly all African-Americans were Republicans because in 1900, it was the Republicans who were the civil rights party. Roosevelt wasn't by any means a "radical". He was right in line with his party on social issues, and a moderate on fiscal issues. (i.e. willing to negotiate with unions and pass worker-protection legislation, unlike his party cohorts but still quite anti-socialist.)
I'm a Windows developer. Last time I got a new machine, I counted the number of applications that I needed to install to completely set up my development environment. That number was over forty. You're telling me that I need to track changes to every one of those applications? Not easy on an OS that doesn't have anything like apt...one reason that while I write Windows code by day I run Linux at home.
There have also been a number of times in my career where I have had to use development software written by companies that either went out of business, or stopped supporting that software. What then?
What Apple understands and Microsoft does not is that it is not my job to make the OS work better. It is the OS's job to make my life easier.
There are some indications that people over forty are less likely to get infected in the first place. (Not unprecedented...the 1918 influenza epidemic disproportionately infected the young.)
No, the poster is exactly right. The bird flu is the new Y2K. That is, lots of people who know what they are doing are working hard at mitigating the risks while the press jabbers on blindly with scare stores.
The thing that people don't seem to realize about "bird flu" is that its really just one part of a larger issue. No one really knows if it will make the jump to human-to-human transmission. The people who know what the hell they are doing are doing their best to reduce that chance. (By preventing bird-to-human infections.) But the larger issue is that an entirely different disease that is currently neither known nor tracked could do the same thing. The chance of some other unknown disease becoming a pandemic is probably more likely than that of "bird flu" becoming a pandemic.
If "bird flu" never comes to anything, it may well be precisely because a lot of doctors and biologists worked very hard to prevent it. And if "bird flu" never comes to anything, the press will probably ignorantly blather on about how maybe the original fears were overblown just like today they are blathering on with panic and scare stories. Just like Y2K.
YMMV. I have distinct memories of first finding out the 9/11 attacks when the owner of the cafe I got coffee at spun his laptop around to show pictures of jets hitting the WTC.
Er...despite "so few" people buying PS3s, they make up 3/4s of all Blu-Ray players in customer's hands...so I'm not sure how you can claim that it isn't a factor especially given that (IIRC) sales of stand-alone HD-DVD players have exceeded stand-alone Blu-Ray players.
Attrocious? Flash-based players basically rescued video from "to view this, please install realplayer" hell. It wasn't until flash 8 based video players that video really started working seemlessly in the browser.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have noted, the rewrite issue is improving daily. I remember slashdot posts like yours from a year or so back that used "10,000 rewrites" as the scare figure. In addition, OSes could be reorganized to minimize the issue. (For instance, just adding more RAM reduces the amount of swapping that is done.) If you look at what is stored on people's hard drives today, the vast majority is stuff that sites for long periods of time. People don't reorganize their MP3 collection 500,000 times.
Why doesn't Baen just publish PDFs? The Sony eReader supports PDF.
Exactly half of people make less than the median income (by definition) and since intelligence is on a bell curve, exactly half of people have average intelligence or less.
Not that I think that's the case, but until we have more actual evidence, it's all just pure guesswork.
Yes...the answer to the question Fermi asked is perhaps that "they" are scattered through the universe, each happy in small, self-sustaining groups of a few star systems, happy to let the rest of the universe lay fallow.
Yes, however, intelligence almost certainly has a cost, if nothing else in the calories required to support it, so unless there is a benefit to balance out the cost it'd be selected against.
What the Fermi paradox does presume is that intelligent species have a need or desire to expand throughout the universe.
This is not entirely a niggle given the way the birthrate has fallen precipitously among all industrialized nations on Earth.
This assumes that intelligent species continue to breed exponentially after gaining interstellar flight.
Perhaps the answer to the "Fermi Paradox" is that intelligent species gain complete control over population expansion before they gain interstellar flight and simply don't need to "conquer the galaxy". It may be that intelligent species simply don't bother expanding after expanding enough to avoid single-planet dooms.
If their physical form didn't allow them to do anything with their intelligence, then evolution couldn't have selected for it.
I would be stunned if the credit card processors let Amazon do that. Amazon also has a contract with the credit card processor. That contract almost certainly lays out in very explicit terms when exactly Amazon is allowed to run a charge.
While it is almost certainly not moral to take advantage of Amazon's mistake, I am fairly certain (IANAL) that it is completely illegal for Amazon to charge a credit card without a customer's authorization. They could probably legally try to bill you for the goods in this case (I'm not sure of the law) but companies are only supposed to charge cards when explicitly authorized to. Anyone caught in this can probably dispute the charges with their credit card company and get them reversed, and if this is widespread enough, Amazon's bank may well fine them for it.
It's because the music executives are realizing that if they insist on DRM, they may well end up at the mercy of a company who's DRM scheme gains monopolistic market share or that other company who wants its DRM scheme to gain monopolistic market share.
Did you know that in the United States there is no law that says a movie theater has to keep a kid out of an R rated movie? Did you know that in the United States, there's no law that says a movie studio must have their movie rated, or that theaters can only show rated movies? There's no legal binding behind the movie rating system at all.
Can your five year old walk into "Saw III"?
Probably not...just because the government isn't involved doesn't mean that anarchy reigns.
The problem isn't the ESRB. The ESRB works perfectly fine. I play lots of games, and I don't think I've ever run into one that was rated incorrectly. There is absolutely no evidence at all that game designers are trying to cheat somehow to get "better" ratings.
The problem is that many parents ignore the ESRB and buy their children any ol' crap. (Just like many parents let their kids watch any ol' movie.) For every clerk who sells a kid an "M" game, there's a hundred parents who buy their kid an "M" game.
Attempts to "improve" the ESRB are met with derision and anger because the ESRB is just fine, and these attempts are almost invariably either pandering to social conservatives or blatant attempts to force game designers to make no adult games at all.
That's not true. In 1900, the Republicans were socially *liberal* and fiscally conservative. (According to the standards of the day, of course.) In 1900, nearly all African-Americans were Republicans because in 1900, it was the Republicans who were the civil rights party. Roosevelt wasn't by any means a "radical". He was right in line with his party on social issues, and a moderate on fiscal issues. (i.e. willing to negotiate with unions and pass worker-protection legislation, unlike his party cohorts but still quite anti-socialist.)
(Otherwise you are correct.)
Hey, it's not my job...I sure as hell don't work for Microsoft!
I'm a Windows developer. Last time I got a new machine, I counted the number of applications that I needed to install to completely set up my development environment. That number was over forty. You're telling me that I need to track changes to every one of those applications? Not easy on an OS that doesn't have anything like apt...one reason that while I write Windows code by day I run Linux at home.
There have also been a number of times in my career where I have had to use development software written by companies that either went out of business, or stopped supporting that software. What then?
What Apple understands and Microsoft does not is that it is not my job to make the OS work better. It is the OS's job to make my life easier.
I know. I was pointing out the irony.
Given that most businesses have higher bandwidth connections than most homes, I'd think everyone working at home would reduce traffic.
There are some indications that people over forty are less likely to get infected in the first place. (Not unprecedented...the 1918 influenza epidemic disproportionately infected the young.)
No, the poster is exactly right. The bird flu is the new Y2K. That is, lots of people who know what they are doing are working hard at mitigating the risks while the press jabbers on blindly with scare stores.
The thing that people don't seem to realize about "bird flu" is that its really just one part of a larger issue. No one really knows if it will make the jump to human-to-human transmission. The people who know what the hell they are doing are doing their best to reduce that chance. (By preventing bird-to-human infections.) But the larger issue is that an entirely different disease that is currently neither known nor tracked could do the same thing. The chance of some other unknown disease becoming a pandemic is probably more likely than that of "bird flu" becoming a pandemic.
If "bird flu" never comes to anything, it may well be precisely because a lot of doctors and biologists worked very hard to prevent it. And if "bird flu" never comes to anything, the press will probably ignorantly blather on about how maybe the original fears were overblown just like today they are blathering on with panic and scare stories. Just like Y2K.
YMMV. I have distinct memories of first finding out the 9/11 attacks when the owner of the cafe I got coffee at spun his laptop around to show pictures of jets hitting the WTC.
Sadly, they played no War Games called "Desert Occupation" to simulate the running of Iraq after the invasion.
Er...despite "so few" people buying PS3s, they make up 3/4s of all Blu-Ray players in customer's hands...so I'm not sure how you can claim that it isn't a factor especially given that (IIRC) sales of stand-alone HD-DVD players have exceeded stand-alone Blu-Ray players.
Attrocious? Flash-based players basically rescued video from "to view this, please install realplayer" hell. It wasn't until flash 8 based video players that video really started working seemlessly in the browser.