Generally, if the OEM version is cheaper than the upgrade version, it's for 1 of 2 reasons:
1. The dealer you bought it from is not an authorized system builder, and probably bought the windows on the gray market.
2. The distributor he bought it from is not authorized, so the copy of windows is from the black market - i.e. pulls from larger OEMs, or outright bootlegs.
In other words, your copy of Windows is probably either gray market or black market software.
Also, the information I used was from Windows 98 OEM, not Windows 2000. So even if you're BZZT-Right, I'm not BZZT-wrong, just BZZT-different.
Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef.
More likely, it will be because of cigarettes or alcohol. Cigarettes are almost ALWAYS cheaper with a card.
There was one particular lawsuit where someone sued a grocery store, and they brought up alcohol purchases on his club card in their legal defense.
I generally avoid these type of cards for that reason. Of course, if you have use a credit card, all of that information is logged anyway. For maximum privacy the only option is cash.
Besides, M$ has every reason to keep OEM software cheap, so that everybody installs their OS, and then later runs out and buys their applications.
So why isn't their OEM software cheap? An OEM copy of Windows is on average $10-$20 more than the retail "upgrade". For example, if the upgrade costs $95, the OEM version will cost $115. And with the OEM version, you have to buy at least a 5 pack to get it without a computer. You can't use the upgrade because it requires a previous operating system to be on the computer.
The reason for this is because Microsoft has a monopoly. They know that every computer you sell has to come with Windows or it's not saleable. So they can charge whatever they want for their operating system.
OEM office applications are slightly cheaper than the retail versions, but they often require the OEM version of Windows to be installed. So as a small computer dealer, you are likely not saving very much money on the full set of applications for the system.
The exceptions to all of these rules are large OEMs like Dell and Gateway, who have agreements to do the manufacturing and packaging of Microsoft OEM software for their own computers. They typically get a "license only" price. They also get a discount for providing their own tech support.
Education should be about how to think, not what to think.
It should be, but it's not. 90% or so of what American public education teaches are things that are products of our society. You learn about the government, about money, about the current emphasis of our culture and our technology. You don't learn about how to survive on the planet Earth in a natural state. You don't learn about the fundamentals of languages of other cultures. You may learn how to sail the boat, but you definitely are not taught how to rock it.
In recent years, schools have gotten rid of English phonics, they have gotten rid of Latin, and the emphasis in Science class is placed on things of our society like recycling, not things of the Earth. Not only that, but unacceptable topics, such as Hemp, are stricken from the history books completely.
I agree that education should be about the fundamental processes of thinking. But curriculums are often chosen for political reasons by school boards. Latin, phonics, and hemp don't make good politics.
BASIC was my first language as a child, but I think that it may be counterproductive to teach it as a first language today.
I agree that C may be a bad choice, because it is just as loose as BASIC and harder to understand. But BASIC, though it is easy to learn, is a sloppy language that may teach bad habits. It doesn't even enforce the use of procedures/functions, like every other language does.
I don't want to get too deep into theories of what to use as first language. I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm planning to start my nine year old daughter on programming as soon as she shows an interest in it.
I think Python may be a good choice. Though I personally don't like Python for myself, I think it is a good language for teaching. It is based heavily on classes and objects, and it makes you indent properly. This makes it difficult to write sloppy code.
Then again, I've also thought about Perl. It has a loose format, scalar variables, and a combination of low level power and high level power. It may make things less intimidating, and she can pick up proper style later.
I'm not sure what the right approach is - teach comfort early and correct the style later, or teach proper style early and hope frustration doesn't become a problem....
I think that for children who have a knack for it, programming at a young age is a big advantage.
I learned to program in BASIC at age 7, and started in other languages (COBOL, then FORTRAN, then C) at age 12. Some of the stuff I got to write at that age had some really original approaches that I may not have used in high school when my mind was less open. (I have tried hard to regain that openmindedness as an adult, but that's a completely different topic.)
For both myself and one of my fellow programmers who started at about the same age, learning early has been a huge advantage. One comparison I could make is baby swimming classes. I was fortunate enough to be in an infant swimming class, and I just naturally knew how to swim at an older age. It sounds stupid, but fundamentals of certain things are easier to learn young than they are when you are older.
Not everyone needs to know how to program. People who are going to use computers to order a pair of shoes on the internet don't need to know how things work. But anyone who is planning a career in computers should have at least a basic knowledge of programming. If you have no idea how computers are programmed, you are more likely to react with frustration and anger when they don't do quite what you expect them to.
And though programming != computer literacy, I believe that the better your general knowledge of how computers work, the faster you can learn to operate them well.
I agree with you on this. It's become common practice where I live to divert book money (both library book and text book) to buy either new computers or new software. Sometimes I think this is a really bad decision. Books are cool for lots of reasons. In the case of library books they don't ever need to be upgraded. The computer or software that is purchased instead may only have a life of a few years, and may not get fully used during that few years because of training issues.
I know of one particular junior high school that spend over $30,000 on routers, switches, etc. because they were going to do their own internet connectivity. It never got installed because no one knew how, and they wouldn't sub it out because they wouldn't admit their ignorance. Then the local phone company hooked them up with DSL at a discounted rate a couple of years later. As far as I know, all of that equipment is still rotting in a closet.
I believe that limited exposure to computers in the schools is a necessary thing. But I also believe that staying on the bleeding edge of technology at the cost of other budget items is a bad idea.
I think by "Higher Frequencies", he meant multiple gigahertz, not 144 Mhz. In this case, he is correct. The waves around 4 gigahertz may be the size of a Honda, so a rainstorm would only cause a minor disruption of a waveform. But at 20 gigahertz, the waves are about the size of a raindrop, so a raindrops passing through the waves will cause a major disruption.
I would consider 144 Mhz to be a very conventional frequency, considering that the most common band (FM) is in the 100 Mhz range. High frequency would be somewhere in the 10-30 gigahertz range. Just my opinion, though.
Exactly how high is high? I need to do some experiments on that. Hmmm......
Bill Gates was just a tiny little software vendor at the time. His competitor was Digital Research, with a thing called CPM/86. The decision to use the 8086 was made long before Bill Gates even got involved in the process. He was just a software vendor, with no input at all into the design of the machine.
Maybe he had delusions of this type of grandeur, but no footing in reality at the time.
The 68K didn't even exist yet. The Apple Lisa, which was the predecessor to the 68K, was still about 5 years away. Even the 6502, which the Commodore 64 and Apple II used, didn't even exist yet.
The obvious 8 bit choice would have been the Z80 or the 8080 (more likely the Z80). That Z80 was the standard chip for the late 70's CP/M machines. It is possible that Intel had some input on using the 8086 instead of the 8080. The reason for the 8088 was that is used 8 bit bus architecture, which allowed IBM to leverage cheaper motherboard designs. 8086's were simply too expensive to build at the time - an 8086 PC with a green mono monitor and two floppies was somewhere around $6000.
Wrong question. What you should be asking is what's the probably of [stuff] happening in two places, compared to just one?
I understand that is your question. But what is the relevance of it? I'll just throw out a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) at some numbers, to see what our odds are.
Let's suppose that the natural time for the Earth to support humans is about 4,000,000 years barring a natural disaster, or human stupidity. Let's say that through a natural disaster, that is shortened to 10%. That's only 400,000 years. Though no one knows exactly how long we'll last, I'll throw that out as a guess.
Based on our intelligence and the illusion of wonderful technology, as well as the stability of whatever society we create on another planet, let's say we are able to survive 10,000 years. That's still 40 to 1 odds that the Earth people will out survive the space people. So there's a 2.5% chance that having our eggs in two baskets is of any use, assuming our technology is good enough to succeed in the first place. (Keep in mind these are wild ass guesses, make up different numbers if you like.)
Now the assumption that our technology and knowledge is sufficient to create an arificial biosphere is a big assumption. Just as a stupid example, let me throw in carpenter moths and jelly donuts.
In order to make jelly donuts, you need strawberries. When you grow strawberries, in is natural for spider mites to eat the stalks. The natural cure for this is to have carpenter moths kill the spider mites. So without carpenter moths, you can't have jelly donuts.
What is the point of this stupid example? The point is that the Earth is very very complex. Everything from the smallest amoeba to the largest oak tree is necessary to make it work properly. So regardless of how much time and effort we put into an artificial biosphere, the odds of self-sufficiency are almost null.
Why are your descendents less deserving of a long lifespan than you are?
I believe that they are just as deserving as I am. And if the universe agrees with me, they will get what I think they deserve. But my point is, that I think we are misdirecting our efforts if the point of space travel is an extended life span.
As I said above, I'm not implying that we shouldn't explore space. I think it's fun, it's interesting, and I'd love to take the trip. But I still think the odds of extending our lifespan by doing it are somewhere close to zero.
The question is - What is probability of supervolcanos, asteroids, war, and other stuff somewhere else compared to here?
Volcanos or similar natural disasters are probably more likely on another planet than they are on Earth, especially under an artifically created biosphrere.
Smaller asteroids are deflected by the excellent atmosphere of the Earth, and larger ones are reduced in size. This is a luxury we won't have anywhere else.
War? That's a human thing. It's not a matter of where we are, but who we are. If we want to solve that problem, we need to look at ourselves, not our location.
Though all our eggs are in one basket, it's a much better basket than one we are going to be able to build ourselves. My bet is that any artificial habitat we create will be destroyed long before the earth will. I'd even give 1000 to 1 odds on it.
My other question is - why are we so intent on outsurviving the Earth's willingness to let us live here? Why not just appreciate what we are given, and make the most of it? Maybe I'm just going off, but isn't the ego that drives our self preservation getting a little out of hand here?
I agree with you on the surface, but when you look at it a little deeper, space travel is probably not a solution to the problem of resources.
The way the planet works, all resources cycle. A simplistic example is water. When you use it up, it cycles back around and is regenerated. Everything on the planet is this way. Some things are on very fast cycles, some things are on very slow cycles. But everything eventually regenerates. When one particular thing outgrows it's potential to cycle, it stops growing. This probably includes the human population. When the earth can't support growth anymore, we will naturally quit growing or even start dying off. As morbid as it sounds, that's the way things work, and there's probably not much you can do about it.
When you travel into space, you actually remove resources from the shorter term cycles of the earth by carrying them outside our atmosphere. (They may enter into a much larger cycle of the galaxy or universe, but that's a much longer term topic.) So when you leave the earth, everything you take with you is removed from the cycles of the earth, which actually lessens the ability of the earth to support life. So probably all you are doing by travelling to space is moving one tick on the life support chart from here to wherever you go.
In the long run, though space travel is neat and fun and interesting, it is not going to solve any of the long term problems of the human species. I'm not implying that we shouldn't do it. Neatness and funness and interestingness are all worthwhile efforts. But the illusion of solving the problems of the human species through space travel is just that, an illusion.
Re:Trying to Stop a Flood with a Bucket and a Towe
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Older versions of winamp used to convert FROM WMA, but Microsofts lawyer's forced them to take that capability out of their software. If you look at the readme file, it mentions it. Actually, winamp can convert from any format to any other format through output filters, but they have a specific piece of code added to block Microsoft formats, at the request/extortion of Microsoft lawyers.
Similar to the adoption of ATA/66, ATA/100 support will first come to market with add-in PCI cards before being integrated into motherboard chipsets.
Actually, there is already one motherboard I know of that supports ATA-100. It is an Abit Athlon board. There will be several others soon that support it. I believe most of the Socket A boards coming out over the next month or so will support it.
I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but supporting this before Windows is somewhat trivial. Approximately 100% of the hardware that supports it will come with Windows drivers in the box. But it is nice to see Linux on even ground.
3DFX's FSAA is superior to the GeForce's. The way the G-Force does anti-aliasing is to render at a higher resolution and interpolate back down. It cuts your performance immensely, and only works with games that support the higher resolution.
The way 3DFx does FSAA is to render slight variations at the same resolution, and then average them. It is better quality, and works with more games. It is also faster, in the case of 2x. This also allows for 4x FSAA, which is even better quality.
I will probably go with 3dFX for my next video card, because I use a multimedia projector for gaming, which has the advantage of size, but the disadvantage of lower resolution (800x600). FSAA is great for this type of application.
If you use a high resolution monitor, though, you can just set your resolution to 1280x1024 and turn off FSAA. It's not noticable at high resolutions. In this case, I'd probably go for the GeForce 2.
The fact that code presents danger is somewhat irrelevant to the free speech defense.
The landmark case on this was a case about 60 years ago involving a book about nuclear bomb technology. The publishers of the book were sued based on the "danger" of the information. The court held that the book was protected by the First Amendment, even though the information contained in it was undisputedly dangerous.
You can send the source code of a virus to anyone you like, as long as you never compile it or attach it in an active form. The fact that Outlook will run scripts attached to a message as source complicates this issue. But just because Outlook is broken doesn't mean you should arrest people for distributing source code.
The other issue is that our government is prosecuting people who violate our overdependence on technology. What they are essentially doing is enforcing the status quo - requiring that things are allowed to stay the way they are. You're not supposed to rock the boat, and you can get in big trouble for it. However, the boat will eventually tip over, and things will go the direction they are naturally inclined to go. All that resistance does is delay things a little.
What you are looking at here is the difference between correlation and causation.
It's like the cave man who beat his hammer on a rock the same time that lightning struck. Just because he beat his hammer, and lightning struck, doesn't mean that beating the hammer causes lightning.
Correlation does not imply causation. If you choose the causation in advance, and then check for correlation, you can "prove" almost anything.
The study did nothing to investigate the factors involved. You can't just assume that they are one thing or another, because if you are going to assume, there is no reason to do a study in the first place.
What he is talking about is the cost to mass produce CDs.
You can 10000 CDs for much less than 10000 dollars. In larger quantities, they are even cheaper.
So the price in large quantities really is less than $1. Even when you divide up the cost of production, you are still probably in the $2-$3 range on an album that sells well.
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
I definitely am in favor of supporting artists. My income and my social life are both primarily from the entertainment industry. But when I talk to my friends in bands, I am sure to remind them not to blindly jump into a record contract without being aware of all the issues.
If I can't support something because it violates what I believe in, I have trouble feeling guilty about the people who chose that direction.
The first amendment gives you the right to express, or not express, anything you wish. This includes your identity, as expressing your identity is simply another form of expression.
You may also state your ideas without stating your identity. Otherwise, the freedom to state one thing would obligate you to state something else. Freedom of speech is a right. It is not granted by anyone. Rights can never be granted, only taken away. Taking it away, and offering to give it back with conditions of identity, is putting preconditions on rights, which turns them into privileges. Privileges are not rights.
Now, you may state "In order to use this service, you must agree to give up the following rights:" But congress may not pass a law requiring it, because that would be a violation of free speech.
Actually, this is different in the case of encryption, or software in general.
What the US government doesn't want is widespread use of encryption. The way to avoid this is to keep it out of mainstream products.
In your cell phone example, using a US standard does not keep you from calling someone outside the US. If you couldn't use a US cell phone to call someone in Europe, people would get upset about the lack of standards.
Encryption is only effective if it goes from one end to the other. Therefore, two people from different countries need to use the same standard.
What the encryption regulations have done is keep strong encryption out of the hands of the mainstream. These regulations have kept strong encryption from being built into Internet Explorer (for lack of a better mainstream example). If all of the mainstream applications had built-in encryption, and it was friendly enough that even my Aunt in Minnesota could use it, then eavesdropping on the internet would be practically impossible.
Cell phones don't follow a standard, but the worldwide phone system allows multiple standards to talk to each other. With encryption, there is no way to transliterate in the middle, because to do that, you'd have to decode the message.
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Generally, if the OEM version is cheaper than the upgrade version, it's for 1 of 2 reasons:
1. The dealer you bought it from is not an authorized system builder, and probably bought the windows on the gray market.
2. The distributor he bought it from is not authorized, so the copy of windows is from the black market - i.e. pulls from larger OEMs, or outright bootlegs.
In other words, your copy of Windows is probably either gray market or black market software.
Also, the information I used was from Windows 98 OEM, not Windows 2000. So even if you're BZZT-Right, I'm not BZZT-wrong, just BZZT-different.
Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef.
More likely, it will be because of cigarettes or alcohol. Cigarettes are almost ALWAYS cheaper with a card.
There was one particular lawsuit where someone sued a grocery store, and they brought up alcohol purchases on his club card in their legal defense.
I generally avoid these type of cards for that reason. Of course, if you have use a credit card, all of that information is logged anyway. For maximum privacy the only option is cash.
Besides, M$ has every reason to keep OEM software cheap, so that everybody installs their OS, and then later runs out and buys their applications.
So why isn't their OEM software cheap? An OEM copy of Windows is on average $10-$20 more than the retail "upgrade". For example, if the upgrade costs $95, the OEM version will cost $115. And with the OEM version, you have to buy at least a 5 pack to get it without a computer. You can't use the upgrade because it requires a previous operating system to be on the computer.
The reason for this is because Microsoft has a monopoly. They know that every computer you sell has to come with Windows or it's not saleable. So they can charge whatever they want for their operating system.
OEM office applications are slightly cheaper than the retail versions, but they often require the OEM version of Windows to be installed. So as a small computer dealer, you are likely not saving very much money on the full set of applications for the system.
The exceptions to all of these rules are large OEMs like Dell and Gateway, who have agreements to do the manufacturing and packaging of Microsoft OEM software for their own computers. They typically get a "license only" price. They also get a discount for providing their own tech support.
Education should be about how to think, not what to think.
It should be, but it's not. 90% or so of what American public education teaches are things that are products of our society. You learn about the government, about money, about the current emphasis of our culture and our technology. You don't learn about how to survive on the planet Earth in a natural state. You don't learn about the fundamentals of languages of other cultures. You may learn how to sail the boat, but you definitely are not taught how to rock it.
In recent years, schools have gotten rid of English phonics, they have gotten rid of Latin, and the emphasis in Science class is placed on things of our society like recycling, not things of the Earth. Not only that, but unacceptable topics, such as Hemp, are stricken from the history books completely.
I agree that education should be about the fundamental processes of thinking. But curriculums are often chosen for political reasons by school boards. Latin, phonics, and hemp don't make good politics.
BASIC was my first language as a child, but I think that it may be counterproductive to teach it as a first language today.
I agree that C may be a bad choice, because it is just as loose as BASIC and harder to understand. But BASIC, though it is easy to learn, is a sloppy language that may teach bad habits. It doesn't even enforce the use of procedures/functions, like every other language does.
I don't want to get too deep into theories of what to use as first language. I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm planning to start my nine year old daughter on programming as soon as she shows an interest in it.
I think Python may be a good choice. Though I personally don't like Python for myself, I think it is a good language for teaching. It is based heavily on classes and objects, and it makes you indent properly. This makes it difficult to write sloppy code.
Then again, I've also thought about Perl. It has a loose format, scalar variables, and a combination of low level power and high level power. It may make things less intimidating, and she can pick up proper style later.
I'm not sure what the right approach is - teach comfort early and correct the style later, or teach proper style early and hope frustration doesn't become a problem....
I think that for children who have a knack for it, programming at a young age is a big advantage.
I learned to program in BASIC at age 7, and started in other languages (COBOL, then FORTRAN, then C) at age 12. Some of the stuff I got to write at that age had some really original approaches that I may not have used in high school when my mind was less open. (I have tried hard to regain that openmindedness as an adult, but that's a completely different topic.)
For both myself and one of my fellow programmers who started at about the same age, learning early has been a huge advantage. One comparison I could make is baby swimming classes. I was fortunate enough to be in an infant swimming class, and I just naturally knew how to swim at an older age. It sounds stupid, but fundamentals of certain things are easier to learn young than they are when you are older.
Not everyone needs to know how to program. People who are going to use computers to order a pair of shoes on the internet don't need to know how things work. But anyone who is planning a career in computers should have at least a basic knowledge of programming. If you have no idea how computers are programmed, you are more likely to react with frustration and anger when they don't do quite what you expect them to.
And though programming != computer literacy, I believe that the better your general knowledge of how computers work, the faster you can learn to operate them well.
I agree with you on this. It's become common practice where I live to divert book money (both library book and text book) to buy either new computers or new software. Sometimes I think this is a really bad decision. Books are cool for lots of reasons. In the case of library books they don't ever need to be upgraded. The computer or software that is purchased instead may only have a life of a few years, and may not get fully used during that few years because of training issues.
I know of one particular junior high school that spend over $30,000 on routers, switches, etc. because they were going to do their own internet connectivity. It never got installed because no one knew how, and they wouldn't sub it out because they wouldn't admit their ignorance. Then the local phone company hooked them up with DSL at a discounted rate a couple of years later. As far as I know, all of that equipment is still rotting in a closet.
I believe that limited exposure to computers in the schools is a necessary thing. But I also believe that staying on the bleeding edge of technology at the cost of other budget items is a bad idea.
Actually, 886 would be short for 80886, so in 72 generations, we'll be at 88086.
But anyhow....
I think by "Higher Frequencies", he meant multiple gigahertz, not 144 Mhz. In this case, he is correct. The waves around 4 gigahertz may be the size of a Honda, so a rainstorm would only cause a minor disruption of a waveform. But at 20 gigahertz, the waves are about the size of a raindrop, so a raindrops passing through the waves will cause a major disruption.
I would consider 144 Mhz to be a very conventional frequency, considering that the most common band (FM) is in the 100 Mhz range. High frequency would be somewhere in the 10-30 gigahertz range. Just my opinion, though.
Exactly how high is high? I need to do some experiments on that. Hmmm......
Bill Gates was just a tiny little software vendor at the time. His competitor was Digital Research, with a thing called CPM/86. The decision to use the 8086 was made long before Bill Gates even got involved in the process. He was just a software vendor, with no input at all into the design of the machine.
Maybe he had delusions of this type of grandeur, but no footing in reality at the time.
The 68K didn't even exist yet. The Apple Lisa, which was the predecessor to the 68K, was still about 5 years away. Even the 6502, which the Commodore 64 and Apple II used, didn't even exist yet.
The obvious 8 bit choice would have been the Z80 or the 8080 (more likely the Z80). That Z80 was the standard chip for the late 70's CP/M machines. It is possible that Intel had some input on using the 8086 instead of the 8080. The reason for the 8088 was that is used 8 bit bus architecture, which allowed IBM to leverage cheaper motherboard designs. 8086's were simply too expensive to build at the time - an 8086 PC with a green mono monitor and two floppies was somewhere around $6000.
For a possible solution to whole gas and rainforest thing, the book I'd recommend is The Emperor's New Clothes.
Just thought I'd throw in a twist.
Wrong question. What you should be asking is what's the probably of [stuff] happening in two places, compared to just one?
I understand that is your question. But what is the relevance of it? I'll just throw out a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) at some numbers, to see what our odds are.
Let's suppose that the natural time for the Earth to support humans is about 4,000,000 years barring a natural disaster, or human stupidity. Let's say that through a natural disaster, that is shortened to 10%. That's only 400,000 years. Though no one knows exactly how long we'll last, I'll throw that out as a guess.
Based on our intelligence and the illusion of wonderful technology, as well as the stability of whatever society we create on another planet, let's say we are able to survive 10,000 years. That's still 40 to 1 odds that the Earth people will out survive the space people. So there's a 2.5% chance that having our eggs in two baskets is of any use, assuming our technology is good enough to succeed in the first place. (Keep in mind these are wild ass guesses, make up different numbers if you like.)
Now the assumption that our technology and knowledge is sufficient to create an arificial biosphere is a big assumption. Just as a stupid example, let me throw in carpenter moths and jelly donuts.
In order to make jelly donuts, you need strawberries. When you grow strawberries, in is natural for spider mites to eat the stalks. The natural cure for this is to have carpenter moths kill the spider mites. So without carpenter moths, you can't have jelly donuts.
What is the point of this stupid example? The point is that the Earth is very very complex. Everything from the smallest amoeba to the largest oak tree is necessary to make it work properly. So regardless of how much time and effort we put into an artificial biosphere, the odds of self-sufficiency are almost null.
Why are your descendents less deserving of a long lifespan than you are?
I believe that they are just as deserving as I am. And if the universe agrees with me, they will get what I think they deserve. But my point is, that I think we are misdirecting our efforts if the point of space travel is an extended life span.
As I said above, I'm not implying that we shouldn't explore space. I think it's fun, it's interesting, and I'd love to take the trip. But I still think the odds of extending our lifespan by doing it are somewhere close to zero.
The question is - What is probability of supervolcanos, asteroids, war, and other stuff somewhere else compared to here?
Volcanos or similar natural disasters are probably more likely on another planet than they are on Earth, especially under an artifically created biosphrere.
Smaller asteroids are deflected by the excellent atmosphere of the Earth, and larger ones are reduced in size. This is a luxury we won't have anywhere else.
War? That's a human thing. It's not a matter of where we are, but who we are. If we want to solve that problem, we need to look at ourselves, not our location.
Though all our eggs are in one basket, it's a much better basket than one we are going to be able to build ourselves. My bet is that any artificial habitat we create will be destroyed long before the earth will. I'd even give 1000 to 1 odds on it.
My other question is - why are we so intent on outsurviving the Earth's willingness to let us live here? Why not just appreciate what we are given, and make the most of it? Maybe I'm just going off, but isn't the ego that drives our self preservation getting a little out of hand here?
Are those neat plasma wrist rests still going to work at 50,000 degrees, in this new state of matter? Wouldn't you burn your wrists?
I agree with you on the surface, but when you look at it a little deeper, space travel is probably not a solution to the problem of resources.
The way the planet works, all resources cycle. A simplistic example is water. When you use it up, it cycles back around and is regenerated. Everything on the planet is this way. Some things are on very fast cycles, some things are on very slow cycles. But everything eventually regenerates. When one particular thing outgrows it's potential to cycle, it stops growing. This probably includes the human population. When the earth can't support growth anymore, we will naturally quit growing or even start dying off. As morbid as it sounds, that's the way things work, and there's probably not much you can do about it.
When you travel into space, you actually remove resources from the shorter term cycles of the earth by carrying them outside our atmosphere. (They may enter into a much larger cycle of the galaxy or universe, but that's a much longer term topic.) So when you leave the earth, everything you take with you is removed from the cycles of the earth, which actually lessens the ability of the earth to support life. So probably all you are doing by travelling to space is moving one tick on the life support chart from here to wherever you go.
In the long run, though space travel is neat and fun and interesting, it is not going to solve any of the long term problems of the human species. I'm not implying that we shouldn't do it. Neatness and funness and interestingness are all worthwhile efforts. But the illusion of solving the problems of the human species through space travel is just that, an illusion.
Older versions of winamp used to convert FROM WMA, but Microsofts lawyer's forced them to take that capability out of their software. If you look at the readme file, it mentions it. Actually, winamp can convert from any format to any other format through output filters, but they have a specific piece of code added to block Microsoft formats, at the request/extortion of Microsoft lawyers.
Similar to the adoption of ATA/66, ATA/100 support will first come to market with add-in PCI cards before being integrated into motherboard chipsets.
Actually, there is already one motherboard I know of that supports ATA-100. It is an Abit Athlon board. There will be several others soon that support it. I believe most of the Socket A boards coming out over the next month or so will support it.
I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but supporting this before Windows is somewhat trivial. Approximately 100% of the hardware that supports it will come with Windows drivers in the box. But it is nice to see Linux on even ground.
3DFX's FSAA is superior to the GeForce's. The way the G-Force does anti-aliasing is to render at a higher resolution and interpolate back down. It cuts your performance immensely, and only works with games that support the higher resolution.
The way 3DFx does FSAA is to render slight variations at the same resolution, and then average them. It is better quality, and works with more games. It is also faster, in the case of 2x. This also allows for 4x FSAA, which is even better quality.
I will probably go with 3dFX for my next video card, because I use a multimedia projector for gaming, which has the advantage of size, but the disadvantage of lower resolution (800x600). FSAA is great for this type of application.
If you use a high resolution monitor, though, you can just set your resolution to 1280x1024 and turn off FSAA. It's not noticable at high resolutions. In this case, I'd probably go for the GeForce 2.
The fact that code presents danger is somewhat irrelevant to the free speech defense.
The landmark case on this was a case about 60 years ago involving a book about nuclear bomb technology. The publishers of the book were sued based on the "danger" of the information. The court held that the book was protected by the First Amendment, even though the information contained in it was undisputedly dangerous.
You can send the source code of a virus to anyone you like, as long as you never compile it or attach it in an active form. The fact that Outlook will run scripts attached to a message as source complicates this issue. But just because Outlook is broken doesn't mean you should arrest people for distributing source code.
The other issue is that our government is prosecuting people who violate our overdependence on technology. What they are essentially doing is enforcing the status quo - requiring that things are allowed to stay the way they are. You're not supposed to rock the boat, and you can get in big trouble for it. However, the boat will eventually tip over, and things will go the direction they are naturally inclined to go. All that resistance does is delay things a little.
What you are looking at here is the difference between correlation and causation.
It's like the cave man who beat his hammer on a rock the same time that lightning struck. Just because he beat his hammer, and lightning struck, doesn't mean that beating the hammer causes lightning.
Correlation does not imply causation. If you choose the causation in advance, and then check for correlation, you can "prove" almost anything.
The study did nothing to investigate the factors involved. You can't just assume that they are one thing or another, because if you are going to assume, there is no reason to do a study in the first place.
This is mentioned in the article. Note the quote from Jon Barsook about a quarter of the way down the page. Did you read the article?
What he is talking about is the cost to mass produce CDs.
You can 10000 CDs for much less than 10000 dollars. In larger quantities, they are even cheaper.
So the price in large quantities really is less than $1. Even when you divide up the cost of production, you are still probably in the $2-$3 range on an album that sells well.
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
I definitely am in favor of supporting artists. My income and my social life are both primarily from the entertainment industry. But when I talk to my friends in bands, I am sure to remind them not to blindly jump into a record contract without being aware of all the issues.
If I can't support something because it violates what I believe in, I have trouble feeling guilty about the people who chose that direction.
The first amendment gives you the right to express, or not express, anything you wish. This includes your identity, as expressing your identity is simply another form of expression.
You may also state your ideas without stating your identity. Otherwise, the freedom to state one thing would obligate you to state something else. Freedom of speech is a right. It is not granted by anyone. Rights can never be granted, only taken away. Taking it away, and offering to give it back with conditions of identity, is putting preconditions on rights, which turns them into privileges. Privileges are not rights.
Now, you may state "In order to use this service, you must agree to give up the following rights:" But congress may not pass a law requiring it, because that would be a violation of free speech.
Actually, this is different in the case of encryption, or software in general.
What the US government doesn't want is widespread use of encryption. The way to avoid this is to keep it out of mainstream products.
In your cell phone example, using a US standard does not keep you from calling someone outside the US. If you couldn't use a US cell phone to call someone in Europe, people would get upset about the lack of standards.
Encryption is only effective if it goes from one end to the other. Therefore, two people from different countries need to use the same standard.
What the encryption regulations have done is keep strong encryption out of the hands of the mainstream. These regulations have kept strong encryption from being built into Internet Explorer (for lack of a better mainstream example). If all of the mainstream applications had built-in encryption, and it was friendly enough that even my Aunt in Minnesota could use it, then eavesdropping on the internet would be practically impossible.
Cell phones don't follow a standard, but the worldwide phone system allows multiple standards to talk to each other. With encryption, there is no way to transliterate in the middle, because to do that, you'd have to decode the message.