Is it true that he could continue to use the material that he has already purchased? If so that would put a slightly less ominous tinge on the affair. (Still nothing that would inspire me to purchase a Kindle, but better than my original impression.)
The car analogy to that would be that he could continue to drive the car he just bought from Amazon, but he was no longer allowed to fill it up with gas.
The fact that they didn't brick his Kindle doesn't matter because he can never obtain the content to justify this expensive purchase (aka not being able to drive the car after emptying the gas tank).
Or perhaps you should think of something other than your own energy consumption. Here's a pop quiz - what percentage of overall electrical energy consumed is residential. And for extra credit - how much of the remainder is at night?
I don't know where your hostility is coming from... except perhaps from inadequate understanding of the situation and a case of inflamed self-righteousness.
It's the industrial consumption that is the main reason for why solar won't do. Hydroelectric power physically destroys nature, and wind power destroys the look of whatever is still untouched. That's why we need fission... and eventually fusion - to provide the lion's share of the industrial electricity for plants that do not shut down their machinery overnight - the same plants that will be making parts for the solar panels that the rest of us will use to distribute the residential electricity generation, and feed our 40" plasmas.
Ideology is all well and good... but the whole concept of a "progressive" president having an energy secretary that claims to oppose nuclear power as well as coal, is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.
Renewable energy is all well and good, but the fact is that at the moment, it's not going to provide us with all the energy that we need. So while we should be adapting our infrastructure to support more renewable resources (solar, I am looking at you), we cannot afford to forget that it is nuclear power that promises us the quickest (and cleanest) way to combat our oil dependency. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, burning any petroleum-derived products for electricity generation borders on the criminal, because while we have plenty of other ways to spin the turbines when the oil runs out, we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics.
Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
You, sir, should really visit an endocrinologist if you're drinking 30-40 cups of anything per day.
Unless you're constantly sweating in high heat, and are losing liters of water per day, such high liquid consumption may be a sign that your body is trying to compensate for something.
They knew that this was going to happen though. AT&T had their hands full with the 2G iPhone, and knew exactly the kind of demand they were going to get when it went 3G.
But instead, they chose to continue charging outrageous fees (and FORCING you to get an overpriced data plan)... without doing much to upgrade their network.
Furthermore, I believe that AT&T is deliberately throttling speeds to 3G iPhones, because I get much higher speeds using the Samsung Blackjack in the same location, both using AT&Ts service. As a matter of fact, most of the time, the Blackjack is 2X faster (400-1000kbps vs. 200-600kbps).
Now I really like my iPhone and it still does work very well, even despite the slower speeds. Within a year or two, the network will probably receive some upgrades... just like it happened when I first got the Blackjack 3 years ago. Then, I would hardly get 3G anywhere, and when I would get it, it'd never go above 400kbps. Before I got the iPhone, I'd easily get 800kbps 3G virtually everywhere, including places where I had trouble getting EDGE a couple of years ago.
By that logic, why should a "boring" Honda Accord out-accelerate the fastest cars made in 1950... or 1940... or how about the fastest horse...
For those of you who demand vibrating wheels, lower speed limits, and computer control with no driver input, I have to tell you:
You can have my Acura TSX when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I LIKE that it feels at 75 like my old '98 Camry at 45 (and probably gets to that speed faster). And before you can take it from me, you'll have to deal with my 2nd amendment rights.
This is the same stupid "logic" by which the UK is banning carrying simple pocketknives. Wake up people - learn how to drive, and stop trying to ruin a leisure for those of us who can.
... or perhaps the reason they saw declining figures starting at the age of 27, is that older people who are more intelligent, tend to not have the time, choose not to waste the effort, and do not need the $100, to participate in these kinds of studies.
That's the problem with doing these kinds of studies as a point-measurement across an age-range. The test groups cannot possibly be equivalent, unless a VERY large sample is taken at random from the population. Frankly, I'll have trouble believing such a study unless it's a prospective study that tests the same volunteers across a span of their lifetime.
How about we just realize that life is dangerous and grow the fuck up.
Otherwise we should ban cars, liquor, cigarettes, saturated fat, and the jonas brothers... cause these have caused far more strife, suffering, and death, than the terrorists could ever hope for.
You know that the mic tab on the iPhone 3G is a button, right?
You can answer/end a call by clicking it.
You can also start/stop playing music by clicking it when not calling... and you can double-click to advance to the next song, and triple-click to go back a song.
Unfortunately, the lack of voice dialing is really something I don't understand. I can connect my Acura audio system to act as a bluetooth speakerphone for my iPhone... but I cannot dial numbers by just clicking the button on the wheel and speaking, the way my parents can with their cheapo phones...
So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students
Might as well replace "students" with "people". The whole concept that this is somehow limited to graduates of whatever reeks of the "dirty intellectuals" cultural revolution mentality.
It's not graduates that are getting narcissistic, it's much of our society that's changing this way, of which they are but a subset. If you think that the people who don't finish high school and suckle on the NYC welfare tit for much of their life are any less narcissistic, you've got a dose of reality coming...
Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.
Conroy expanded the list to block Adult R18+ and X18+ web sites, and this week said it would also block sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or "revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the standards of morality".
They may be sealed, but most official documents where they want to find out your criminal history will ASK you to provide any criminal history, whether or not it was sealed, under penalty of perjury.
This goes for government jobs and firearms licensing.
The only place where sealing a record may protect you, is when it comes to superficial background checks by non-government employers.
Saying that jail-breaking an iPhone is a violation of the DMCA, is the same thing as claiming that if I own a Blue Oyster Cult mp3, and edit the file to add even MORE COWBELL, I would be committing a DMCA violation.
I'm sorry about your child's autism... and the tremendous toll it has taken on your family, but I have to tell you - reading your comment has made me ever so sadder for our society.
Sir, the only place where either the value of vaccinations or any causative relationship between vaccines and autism are still debated, is in the public press and on the Internet. Anti-vaccination has become a subculture, that is so far off the chart of what is scientifically substantiated, that it is now the prime example of how people will eagerly buy into only the biggest lies.
I have over 12 years of experience in immunology and virology... I have 2 degrees in biology and biomedical science... and after very carefully examining the peer-reviewed primary literature in the matter of autism vs. vaccines, I have found zero evidence to show a positive causative relationship... not even a strong, statistically-significant correlation.
With regards to vaccines in general, to claim that their benefits are questionable is to render the last 50 years of research null and void. It's simply wrong.
I know that my post hasn't made life any better for your family, but I do hope that it can at least help to get you back on track. Honestly, we in the medical research community have only your interests at heart. We're not all part of a giant conspiracy, and if we knew something to be harmful, we'd have withdrawn it long ago. Not trusting us, simply because there are websites full of hate and stupidity that tell you so, is quite a bit like hating black people after reading Clan literature. Every bit as insane, and may be even more damaging.
There are multiple kinds of vaccine, that work differently. There are vaccines that contain killed pathogens, there are vaccines that contain just pieces of pathogens (either purified or synthesized) and there are vaccines that contain attenuated live pathogens.
They all work somewhat differently, and have various rates of success. Why? There are a number of reasons:
1. Specificity: Most vaccines only work against a select group of pathogens, such as certain strains of a virus. So a vaccine will not necessarily protect you against a strain that isn't included. Actually genetic change, either within the patient or the virus can render a vaccine ineffective.
2. Inoculation: Vaccines HELP your body cope with a disease... they can't prevent infection, merely prepare you for fighting it. Give someone a huge dose of a pathogen that they're immune against under normal circumstances, and there's a 100% chance that they'll get sick. They may not get AS sick, as if they didn't have the vaccine, but they'll certainly get sick.
3. Herd Immunity: Due to the above 2 reasons, we are largely protected by vaccines through the fact that pathogens have a hard time spreading in a vaccinated population. Not impossible... just hard. But this relationship is non-linear. Dropping the number of vaccinated people by 5% from 100% to 95% has a much smaller effect than from 95% to 90%. Actually, pretty much anywhere below 90% and you begin to lose benefits. Get anywhere below 80%, and you start to render vaccination irrelevant.
Now, this explanation has included A LOT of simplifications, but I hope you can withhold your stubbornness just long enough to understand it, rather than try to prove yourself right.
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
I don't know do we?
Because our society has certainly decided that scientists can no longer decide scientific facts. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
Over the last 10 years, US and UK have spent tens of millions of dollars to provide "negative proof" of something that we had already known, just to quiet down the conspiracy theorists. But instead of quieting them down, this has empowered them, by giving them and their claims legitimacy. Now, we're faced with a situation where childhood vaccination has taken a nosedive, and we're seeing old goodies like measles re-emerge into small (for now) epidemics. And as herd immunity is eroded further, we will see additional diseases make an impressive comeback.
So now that we took the right to make educated judgments about medical and scientific matters, away from doctors and scientists, we've also demonstrated that as a society we're incapable of making rational decisions... which isn't surprising. The only option left seems to be the courts, where reasonably educated judges may or may not rule according to the best data available. Well... at least there's a chance.
And for those who will scream at me about mercury in vaccines, why don't you compare a single or rare exposure to a tiny amount of mercury... to how much mercury you must feed to your children via fish... and corn syrup.
And as Apple's influence in the music market grows, what is going to happen is that now we're going to have 2 layers of middlemen between us and the artists, as opposed to one... which is necessarily going to cause a reduction in service and an increase in prices, with no benefit for anyone other than the middlemen.
This is one of the chief causes of our economic disaster, as applied to the banking industry, which is now essentially toppling over due to its own weight. This middlemen layering has been very concisely described by Warren Buffett in his 2005 letter to Berkshire stockholders... where he argued that the proliferation of trading volume would cause larger and larger percentages of overall yields to go to the middlemen, until such a time when business owners and shareholders started to receive such small returns that they would essentially be losing money to inflation on their investments.
Matter being drawn into the black holes should be accelerated to damn close to the speed of light, and will emit massive amounts of gamma radiation, with a conversion rate that's higher than even fusion.
If we could harness the energy of the gamma emissions around artificial black holes, we'd be have vast energy generating capability, without the pesky fast neutrons that most fusion reactions generate.
Some great mathematics in this review... it also appears as if Vista isn't just not solving the problems presented to it, but also adds new ones to increase its own workload.
Yes, the government should handle its own intelligence. That being said, it's hard to overlook the "Israel" interjection into the otherwise sound thought process.
One would have to be completely immersed in anti-Israel prejudice in order not to see that if there is one country in the world that values and cherishes the prosperity and security of the U.S. as much or more than U.S. itself, it's Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it true that he could continue to use the material that he has already purchased? If so that would put a slightly less ominous tinge on the affair. (Still nothing that would inspire me to purchase a Kindle, but better than my original impression.)
The car analogy to that would be that he could continue to drive the car he just bought from Amazon, but he was no longer allowed to fill it up with gas.
The fact that they didn't brick his Kindle doesn't matter because he can never obtain the content to justify this expensive purchase (aka not being able to drive the car after emptying the gas tank).
Or perhaps you should think of something other than your own energy consumption. Here's a pop quiz - what percentage of overall electrical energy consumed is residential. And for extra credit - how much of the remainder is at night?
I don't know where your hostility is coming from... except perhaps from inadequate understanding of the situation and a case of inflamed self-righteousness. It's the industrial consumption that is the main reason for why solar won't do. Hydroelectric power physically destroys nature, and wind power destroys the look of whatever is still untouched. That's why we need fission... and eventually fusion - to provide the lion's share of the industrial electricity for plants that do not shut down their machinery overnight - the same plants that will be making parts for the solar panels that the rest of us will use to distribute the residential electricity generation, and feed our 40" plasmas.
We can always produce plastics from other substances, too... like castor oil.
Certainly we can. But at what cost, and on what kind of scale?
The fact that you can do something in the lab, doesn't make it feasible for global adoption.
Ideology is all well and good... but the whole concept of a "progressive" president having an energy secretary that claims to oppose nuclear power as well as coal, is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.
Renewable energy is all well and good, but the fact is that at the moment, it's not going to provide us with all the energy that we need. So while we should be adapting our infrastructure to support more renewable resources (solar, I am looking at you), we cannot afford to forget that it is nuclear power that promises us the quickest (and cleanest) way to combat our oil dependency. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, burning any petroleum-derived products for electricity generation borders on the criminal, because while we have plenty of other ways to spin the turbines when the oil runs out, we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics.
Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
You, sir, should really visit an endocrinologist if you're drinking 30-40 cups of anything per day.
Unless you're constantly sweating in high heat, and are losing liters of water per day, such high liquid consumption may be a sign that your body is trying to compensate for something.
Most probable guess - diabetes.
They knew that this was going to happen though. AT&T had their hands full with the 2G iPhone, and knew exactly the kind of demand they were going to get when it went 3G.
But instead, they chose to continue charging outrageous fees (and FORCING you to get an overpriced data plan)... without doing much to upgrade their network.
Furthermore, I believe that AT&T is deliberately throttling speeds to 3G iPhones, because I get much higher speeds using the Samsung Blackjack in the same location, both using AT&Ts service. As a matter of fact, most of the time, the Blackjack is 2X faster (400-1000kbps vs. 200-600kbps).
Now I really like my iPhone and it still does work very well, even despite the slower speeds. Within a year or two, the network will probably receive some upgrades... just like it happened when I first got the Blackjack 3 years ago. Then, I would hardly get 3G anywhere, and when I would get it, it'd never go above 400kbps. Before I got the iPhone, I'd easily get 800kbps 3G virtually everywhere, including places where I had trouble getting EDGE a couple of years ago.
I'm just saying it would be nice if the law were a little more succinct so that we could see the details of the laws getting passed.
If that were the case, they wouldn't be able to pass a Child Healthcare bill with millions allocated to impotence research... etc...
Also they wouldn't be able to create a reserve of laws that was sufficient to incriminate any citizen at any time.
By that logic, why should a "boring" Honda Accord out-accelerate the fastest cars made in 1950... or 1940... or how about the fastest horse...
For those of you who demand vibrating wheels, lower speed limits, and computer control with no driver input, I have to tell you:
You can have my Acura TSX when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I LIKE that it feels at 75 like my old '98 Camry at 45 (and probably gets to that speed faster). And before you can take it from me, you'll have to deal with my 2nd amendment rights.
This is the same stupid "logic" by which the UK is banning carrying simple pocketknives. Wake up people - learn how to drive, and stop trying to ruin a leisure for those of us who can.
... or perhaps the reason they saw declining figures starting at the age of 27, is that older people who are more intelligent, tend to not have the time, choose not to waste the effort, and do not need the $100, to participate in these kinds of studies.
That's the problem with doing these kinds of studies as a point-measurement across an age-range. The test groups cannot possibly be equivalent, unless a VERY large sample is taken at random from the population. Frankly, I'll have trouble believing such a study unless it's a prospective study that tests the same volunteers across a span of their lifetime.
How about we just realize that life is dangerous and grow the fuck up.
Otherwise we should ban cars, liquor, cigarettes, saturated fat, and the jonas brothers... cause these have caused far more strife, suffering, and death, than the terrorists could ever hope for.
You know that the mic tab on the iPhone 3G is a button, right?
You can answer/end a call by clicking it.
You can also start/stop playing music by clicking it when not calling... and you can double-click to advance to the next song, and triple-click to go back a song.
Unfortunately, the lack of voice dialing is really something I don't understand. I can connect my Acura audio system to act as a bluetooth speakerphone for my iPhone... but I cannot dial numbers by just clicking the button on the wheel and speaking, the way my parents can with their cheapo phones...
Might as well replace "students" with "people". The whole concept that this is somehow limited to graduates of whatever reeks of the "dirty intellectuals" cultural revolution mentality.
It's not graduates that are getting narcissistic, it's much of our society that's changing this way, of which they are but a subset. If you think that the people who don't finish high school and suckle on the NYC welfare tit for much of their life are any less narcissistic, you've got a dose of reality coming...
Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.
So the filter would block the Internet?
He means the Constitution.
They may be sealed, but most official documents where they want to find out your criminal history will ASK you to provide any criminal history, whether or not it was sealed, under penalty of perjury.
This goes for government jobs and firearms licensing.
The only place where sealing a record may protect you, is when it comes to superficial background checks by non-government employers.
Hydroponics and aeroponics work at the scale of gardening, not industrial agriculture.
Tell that to the Israelis.
Look, it's very simple.
Saying that jail-breaking an iPhone is a violation of the DMCA, is the same thing as claiming that if I own a Blue Oyster Cult mp3, and edit the file to add even MORE COWBELL, I would be committing a DMCA violation.
I'm sorry about your child's autism... and the tremendous toll it has taken on your family, but I have to tell you - reading your comment has made me ever so sadder for our society.
Sir, the only place where either the value of vaccinations or any causative relationship between vaccines and autism are still debated, is in the public press and on the Internet. Anti-vaccination has become a subculture, that is so far off the chart of what is scientifically substantiated, that it is now the prime example of how people will eagerly buy into only the biggest lies.
I have over 12 years of experience in immunology and virology... I have 2 degrees in biology and biomedical science... and after very carefully examining the peer-reviewed primary literature in the matter of autism vs. vaccines, I have found zero evidence to show a positive causative relationship... not even a strong, statistically-significant correlation.
With regards to vaccines in general, to claim that their benefits are questionable is to render the last 50 years of research null and void. It's simply wrong.
I know that my post hasn't made life any better for your family, but I do hope that it can at least help to get you back on track. Honestly, we in the medical research community have only your interests at heart. We're not all part of a giant conspiracy, and if we knew something to be harmful, we'd have withdrawn it long ago. Not trusting us, simply because there are websites full of hate and stupidity that tell you so, is quite a bit like hating black people after reading Clan literature. Every bit as insane, and may be even more damaging.
There are multiple kinds of vaccine, that work differently. There are vaccines that contain killed pathogens, there are vaccines that contain just pieces of pathogens (either purified or synthesized) and there are vaccines that contain attenuated live pathogens.
They all work somewhat differently, and have various rates of success. Why? There are a number of reasons:
1. Specificity: Most vaccines only work against a select group of pathogens, such as certain strains of a virus. So a vaccine will not necessarily protect you against a strain that isn't included. Actually genetic change, either within the patient or the virus can render a vaccine ineffective.
2. Inoculation: Vaccines HELP your body cope with a disease... they can't prevent infection, merely prepare you for fighting it. Give someone a huge dose of a pathogen that they're immune against under normal circumstances, and there's a 100% chance that they'll get sick. They may not get AS sick, as if they didn't have the vaccine, but they'll certainly get sick.
3. Herd Immunity: Due to the above 2 reasons, we are largely protected by vaccines through the fact that pathogens have a hard time spreading in a vaccinated population. Not impossible... just hard. But this relationship is non-linear. Dropping the number of vaccinated people by 5% from 100% to 95% has a much smaller effect than from 95% to 90%. Actually, pretty much anywhere below 90% and you begin to lose benefits. Get anywhere below 80%, and you start to render vaccination irrelevant.
Now, this explanation has included A LOT of simplifications, but I hope you can withhold your stubbornness just long enough to understand it, rather than try to prove yourself right.
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
I don't know do we?
Because our society has certainly decided that scientists can no longer decide scientific facts. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
Over the last 10 years, US and UK have spent tens of millions of dollars to provide "negative proof" of something that we had already known, just to quiet down the conspiracy theorists. But instead of quieting them down, this has empowered them, by giving them and their claims legitimacy. Now, we're faced with a situation where childhood vaccination has taken a nosedive, and we're seeing old goodies like measles re-emerge into small (for now) epidemics. And as herd immunity is eroded further, we will see additional diseases make an impressive comeback.
So now that we took the right to make educated judgments about medical and scientific matters, away from doctors and scientists, we've also demonstrated that as a society we're incapable of making rational decisions... which isn't surprising. The only option left seems to be the courts, where reasonably educated judges may or may not rule according to the best data available. Well... at least there's a chance.
And for those who will scream at me about mercury in vaccines, why don't you compare a single or rare exposure to a tiny amount of mercury... to how much mercury you must feed to your children via fish... and corn syrup.
How many times could you fire up Counter-strike on a monitor your don't own, and give it a 30-minute whirl?
And as Apple's influence in the music market grows, what is going to happen is that now we're going to have 2 layers of middlemen between us and the artists, as opposed to one... which is necessarily going to cause a reduction in service and an increase in prices, with no benefit for anyone other than the middlemen.
This is one of the chief causes of our economic disaster, as applied to the banking industry, which is now essentially toppling over due to its own weight. This middlemen layering has been very concisely described by Warren Buffett in his 2005 letter to Berkshire stockholders... where he argued that the proliferation of trading volume would cause larger and larger percentages of overall yields to go to the middlemen, until such a time when business owners and shareholders started to receive such small returns that they would essentially be losing money to inflation on their investments.
Same scenario applies here.
There is.
Matter being drawn into the black holes should be accelerated to damn close to the speed of light, and will emit massive amounts of gamma radiation, with a conversion rate that's higher than even fusion.
If we could harness the energy of the gamma emissions around artificial black holes, we'd be have vast energy generating capability, without the pesky fast neutrons that most fusion reactions generate.
Some great mathematics in this review... it also appears as if Vista isn't just not solving the problems presented to it, but also adds new ones to increase its own workload.
Fascinating...
Nice underhanded troll.
Yes, the government should handle its own intelligence. That being said, it's hard to overlook the "Israel" interjection into the otherwise sound thought process.
One would have to be completely immersed in anti-Israel prejudice in order not to see that if there is one country in the world that values and cherishes the prosperity and security of the U.S. as much or more than U.S. itself, it's Israel.