It would be cool to put a solar powered generator on top of that space elevator. Maybe one of those neato liquid sodium jobs so the anchor rock station could generate power through out the rotational period. Make a really big center conductor for sending the power down the anchor line. How thick would the carbon nanotube have to be to insulate a 60+ mile long transmission line? Or just transmit the power down as microwaves.
It's an irregular adjective, I'm a free thinker, you're exocentric, he's totally twisted.
There are too many ways to work around the RIAA's (or anyone else's) ability to shut everything down. Also there is something about the virtual isolation of working on a computer. Techniques for evading detection will evolve to meet the pent up demand for on demand music for individual tracks.
Also despite the fact that it is possible to track down IP address and then the physical address used for that IP most people still feel anonymous or at least too small to be noticed on the open 'net. The RIAA would have to take on a significant percentage of the file traders before there is a real dampening effect from their efforts. Given that there are millions of file traders and the RIAA will only have the resources to persecute a few hundred of even a thousand that makes losing this lottery fairly slim.
The content of these articles read like a poorly constructed conspiracy theory rag. Oh, and you forgot to mention that guy that sells sea coral calcium.
Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity, ignorance or laziness.
documentary style music.
Voice over: It's the wheel of glitches.
Location: M$aFT glitch preserve.
M$aFT Tour Guide: The life cycle of the glitch is an often fast and furrious one, many only living for a few short days upto a few months typically. Although on some low exposure less used systems they may obtain a Methuselahn life span of a several years. slight pause Tour Guide Continues: Here at the M$aFT glitch preserve we try to breed and raise our glitches for survival in the wild.
Interupting Guide Tour member: Why do you breed and raise glitchtes anyway? Aren't there enough bugs in the wild already. I mean...
Cutting off the Tour member Tour Guide: They are glitches, not bugs. As far as the number of glitches in the wild each glitch performs important ecological functions. There are some that encourage users to upgrade their Office packages, there are others that spark the need to upgrade development IDEs and there are others still that motivate upgrades to new versions of our glitch preserve, uh, I mean OS.
The trinary algebra would work very similarly to binary or boolean algebra. Rank the values as true, ambiguous, and false. Then a TAND (trinary AND) would take on the value of of the lowest operand. The TOR would take on the highest value etc.
However, the article was really talking about gaining extra memory capacity by using greater than bi-valent state memory. So then you would have some sort of mapping function - as described in the article - in which case from the user/developer stand point nothing would not really change except that the cost of the hardware may drop relative to performance.
You're right, that's not the case. The *point* is a homogenous environment limits the variety of systems to which students may experience. The very best developers are those which have worked on a variety of systems. This allows them to think in more abstract terms and not just in the solution space of a single system. Both adaptive-ness and creativity are enhance by knowledge of many systems and languages too. If M$aFT gets it's way we'll all be limited to C#.NET and some blue screening version of windows forever. yick. it's enough to make one want to go Amish.
Haha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Only slightly less well know is this: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! - Vezzini
Today in the news: a roving band of exoskeleton-blue hairs held up a convenience store. In addition to taking all the cash they could nab, two of the perps were seen carrying off a row of shelves full of hair care products and over the counter medications. As an odd side note the only injury occurred after one of the robo-bandits instructed a by-stander to stop slouching. When the by-stander didn't respond he received a sharp rap across the back of his hand. He was later quoted as saying "That really hurt. I didn't think granny could hit so hard."
Haha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Only slightly less well know is this: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
- Vizzini
I guess the sarcasm was lost when I made the post. It was not intended to be a jab a DARPA which I hold in high regard but a jab at Al Gore.
Sorry for any distress I may have caused.
This is the same reason that no software house will ever produce bug free products. If you make a perfect application that does the job then there's no incentive to upgrade. Build bugs in to products but no so severe that user won't use it. You can buy a lot more mini vans with bug laden code. Even put your kids through college.
M$FT doesn't have time to fix bugs. These problems are an annoyance and only after they have been taken to task time and time and time again - they have finally decided to do something about it. They have been rushing software out the door for so long that they don't know how to perform genuine quality control. M$FT is not a software company that makes money so much as it is a company that makes money by making software. Well, buying up other's software slapping on some lip stick and then putting it out as their own.
Bill Gates: "Leave us alone so we can innovate" User: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Perhaps I was thinking about one of the possible consequences of this line of research.
It does pose other ethical questions just on its on. From the very bottom of the article _ Richard Doerflinger, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he felt certain that the human-rabbit embryos were human enough to deserve protections.
"I think because all the nuclear DNA is human," Doerflinger said, "we'd consider this an organism of the human species." _
It begs one of the most basic questions of human existence: are we ghosts in the machine or are we purely material beings?
If we are ghosts in the machine then the bodies we inhabit are a temporary form of existence that will be transcended. So the risk for the future can not be in complete jeopardy regardless of what we do to the bodies of future generations.
From a materialist point of view I should think that this is more frightening. The very definition of self for future generations is potentially at stake. Genetic manipulation brought about the prospect of designer babies but that was generally limited to human DNA or even limited the potential to selecting which genetic traits a baby will have from it's parents (as in Gataca). But raises the specter of animal DNA getting in to the mix.
Perhaps it is too far off for you and I specifically to worry about but they day will come when these are real concerns. Perhaps sooner than later.
Or how fast comments about how fast rabbits multiply are multiplying.
Actually this is a bit terrifying. I don't believe the world is ready for genuine human/animal mixes. Image yourself (if these abominations can survive) as one of the poor creatures from the movie. As at least part human you would be a social creature. As at least part animal (if there are any physical or at least obvious psychological manifestations of your animal self) you would be an outcast and a freak. The best one could hope for is some meager acceptance through pity. That's not much of a life. Just because because one can do something doesn't mean that one should. Hopefully this type of DNA mixing and cloning will prove to be untenable if for now one else then at least for the sake of the individuals that may be produced this way.
How hard was it getting though Jr. High with normal sized ears and no fluffy tail ? Now at this to the mix and try to get a date for the sock hop! (NPI)
A good solution is to make each voting machine stand alone and produce a human readable output in magnetic ink. This way the voter may check the results on the vote slip be fore turning it in. The vote reading machine would be something like a check sorter. If there's a problem with the results then the votes can be read by people and tallied by hand. This eliminates the hanging chad and other problems with punch cards and prevents hacking from an out side source. It also means that if
someone wanted to rig the election they would need access to the vote reading machine which would be much more difficult as these would be much more tightly controlled. A bit 20th century perhaps but it produces a paper trail which every auditor likes to have.
To make it even easier for the voter the results could be color coded so that each party has its own traditional color. Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats, Green for Ralph Nadir, etc.
Example voting slip:
Offices for election:
President of the United States: Ralph Nadir (G)
Congressional District 2: Joe Bob Brigs (R)
Senate Seat: Samuel Adams (D)
State Constitutional Amendments
Proposition 7: Yes
As a commercial software developer why would you ever produce a piece of software that is perfect? Once eveyone who wants a copy is happy with the copy they have then you're out of business. Just make the damn thing good enough. Then people will use it and then buy the bug fix upgrades once they've had enough of the bugs. While you're at it put in some extra features with the upgrade but make sure the new stuff has bugs too.
The first amendment was originally considered to cover political
speech. The early writings of the constitutional framers particularly
in the federalist papers will confirm this. Subsequently the courts
have generally held that political speech is more protected than other
forms of speech, like advertising. If free speech were universally
protected then there would be no room for disclosure laws as applied to
marketing. Take advertisements for prescription drugs, these ads must
include side effects and must be accurate and not make claims which
these drugs can not provide.
The other point to remember about the first amendment is it limits
*Congress's* power to enact laws that abridge free speech. The
subsequent amendment (the 14th) that many quote as applying these
restrictions to the states is somewhat ambiguous and has a mixed bag of
rulings from the courts on how to apply it to the states. The supreme
court has been on a states rights tilt recently so they interpret the
meaning of the 1st amendment in terms of how it is applied by the 14th
to the state of Texas and decided that the pornography laws in Texas do
not abridge the rights of free speech as pornography in the eyes of the
courts and the law is considered worthless speech or speech of very
little value. What constitutes pornography has changed over time
but
basically it has always been considered any sexually explicit material
of little or no political, scientific or artistic worth.
If this comic book had portrayed president having sex with an intern
and as a result having some sort of impact on the legal landscape then
maybe an argument could have been made this is indeed political speech
and therefore entitled to the highest level of protection.
While I generally hold that adults should be allowed to make their own
choices there are consequences to the choices each individual makes
each of which impacts the rest of society to varying degrees. It is our
collective will as expressed through the political system to decide
what choices we as a whole will tolerate. Here is an excellent link
about the results of generally available pornography.
The XM29 is a dual use two component weapon. It uses the once despised and now accepted.223 round that the AR-10/15 M16 used. This part of the weapon may be fired with or with out the ballistics computer meaning that if for some reason all the electronic gadgets fail then the soldier at least has what he had before. For sniping the ballistics computer offers an automatically adjusted sight picture that computes the effects of bullet drop at long ranges. The other really cool bit that the build in ballistics computer offers is the ability to accurately shoot around corners or over the top of a protective burm. if youâ(TM)ve seen footage of soldiers holding their guns out over or around cover and shooting blindly in the generally direction of the enemy then you could imagine that same soldier using the build in camera on the gun to see (though the display on his helmet) what his gun is pointing at.
As for technological failure in the field, well that can happen, but this not Ms. Windows on a PC. There are complex systems that combat systems rely on now that if that system fail could mean the life of the operator. Most notably are the latest combat jets like the F18 or soon to come in to service Joint Strike fighter or even the F22. None of these planes can fly if their computers go down and most notably the F22 and the JSF are both aerodynamically unstable and with out constant corrections from the flight computer (several hundred per second) the plain would tumble though the air making ejection almost impossible. And this sort of reliance on technology is not limited to military applications either. If you have flown in an AirBus then you have been on a plane which if itâ(TM)s flight computer went dead then the plane would be un-flyable because the connections between the pilots controls (yoke, throttle, etc.) and the control surfaces (rudder, flaps, elevator, etc) and engines are relayed by computer down a communications wire to a embedded control devices (these run software too) that then makes the adjustments that pilot wants.
The post that referred to the difference between the 1000 meter and 400 meter range with respect to the XM29 and the M16 has to do with the grenade launcher that is build in to the MX29 and is an optional under slung add on to the M16. The add on for the M16 is a 40mm pump action launcher with a rotary magazine and because of the aiming sights is only accurate to 400 meters (with well develop skill with this weapon) the XM29 will have a 20 mm grenade with a build in micro chip that used in conjunction with the ballistics computer will allow the fired grenade to detonate with greater accuracy over the target.
With open software you can always find (or write) a browser that just won't play this junk. However, combine this with 'Next-Generation Secure Computing Base' (you really won't own your computer then) and you will someday see the unstoppable porn add from ugga boogga land (a far off country where nothing is regulated). I hope your kids or worse your wife doesn't walk in to the room while this thing goes off! Just try to explain that you didn't go looking for it and it's all a big misunderstanding. One that you can't replicate because the adds for the site you just found keep changing. Good luck and remember to keep your finger on the power switch.
The after market for ink jet printer cartridges just got smaller. Here's a link to a Register article about Lexmark, printer cartridges and the DCMA.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28811.html
There used to be a check on the price of printer cartridges in the form of competition. Now (with yet another abuse of the DCMA) it looks like Lexmark will eliminate its competitors. One can only expect the price on cartridges to go up.
What does this mean for you and me? Well, a quick check on the CompUSA web site shows that one can buy a brand new Lexmark Z45 Color Jet Printer for $86.74. On the same site the two replacement cartridges are $31.99 for black and $37.99 for color making the grand total on replacement cartridges a whopping $69.98 leaving $16.76 as the cost of the printer itself. So one can only conclude that a printer that costs this little can not be of high quality and durability. In the final analysis, those of use who buy low end ink jet printers will have to live with the fact that we are buying printer cartridges and the printers themselves are only a mechanism to utilize this expensive ink. The up side is this, when your cartridges run out you have the option of buying the next model of low end printers for very little marginal cost. Perhaps small recompense for so grand an outlay for ink.
I wonder, how much ink mass is in one of these print cartridges and how does the price by mass relate to that of silver or gold ? I am afraid to do the math and find out. Perhaps instead of buying into the precious metals market in times of economic down turn the smart investor may want to consider this market instead.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be cool to put a solar powered generator on top of that space elevator. Maybe one of those neato liquid sodium jobs so the anchor rock station could generate power through out the rotational period. Make a really big center conductor for sending the power down the anchor line. How thick would the carbon nanotube have to be to insulate a 60+ mile long transmission line? Or just transmit the power down as microwaves.
It's an irregular adjective, I'm a free thinker, you're exocentric, he's totally twisted.
True enough.
There are too many ways to work around the RIAA's (or anyone else's) ability to shut everything down. Also there is something about the virtual isolation of working on a computer. Techniques for evading detection will evolve to meet the pent up demand for on demand music for individual tracks.
Also despite the fact that it is possible to track down IP address and then the physical address used for that IP most people still feel anonymous or at least too small to be noticed on the open 'net. The RIAA would have to take on a significant percentage of the file traders before there is a real dampening effect from their efforts. Given that there are millions of file traders and the RIAA will only have the resources to persecute a few hundred of even a thousand that makes losing this lottery fairly slim.
Bush: Gee, Dick, what do you want to do tonight?
Cheney: The same thing we do every night, Dubbya.
Try to take over the world!
Absolutely!
The content of these articles read like a poorly constructed conspiracy theory rag.
Oh, and you forgot to mention that guy that sells sea coral calcium.
Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity, ignorance or laziness.
documentary style music.
...
Voice over: It's the wheel of glitches.
Location: M$aFT glitch preserve.
M$aFT Tour Guide: The life cycle of the glitch is an often fast and furrious one, many only living for a few short days upto a few months typically. Although on some low exposure less used systems they may obtain a Methuselahn life span of a several years.
slight pause
Tour Guide Continues: Here at the M$aFT glitch preserve we try to breed and raise our glitches for survival in the wild.
Interupting Guide Tour member: Why do you breed and raise glitchtes anyway? Aren't there enough bugs in the wild already. I mean
Cutting off the Tour member Tour Guide: They are glitches, not bugs. As far as the number of glitches in the wild each glitch performs important ecological functions. There are some that encourage users to upgrade their Office packages, there are others that spark the need to upgrade development IDEs and there are others still that motivate upgrades to new versions of our glitch preserve, uh, I mean OS.
The trinary algebra would work very similarly to binary or boolean algebra. Rank the values as true, ambiguous, and false. Then a TAND (trinary AND) would take on the value of of the lowest operand. The TOR would take on the highest value etc.
However, the article was really talking about gaining extra memory capacity by using greater than bi-valent state memory. So then you would have some sort of mapping function - as described in the article - in which case from the user/developer stand point nothing would not really change except that the cost of the hardware may drop relative to performance.
You're right, that's not the case. The *point* is a homogenous environment limits the variety of systems to which students may experience. The very best developers are those which have worked on a variety of systems. This allows them to think in more abstract terms and not just in the solution space of a single system. Both adaptive-ness and creativity are enhance by knowledge of many systems and languages too. If M$aFT gets it's way we'll all be limited to C#.NET and some blue screening version of windows forever. yick. it's enough to make one want to go Amish.
Haha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.
The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Only slightly less well know is this: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
- Vezzini
Today in the news: a roving band of exoskeleton-blue hairs held up a convenience store. In addition to taking all the cash they could nab, two of the perps were seen carrying off a row of shelves full of hair care products and over the counter medications. As an odd side note the only injury occurred after one of the robo-bandits instructed a by-stander to stop slouching. When the by-stander didn't respond he received a sharp rap across the back of his hand. He was later quoted as saying "That really hurt. I didn't think granny could hit so hard."
Haha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Only slightly less well know is this: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
- Vizzini
I guess the sarcasm was lost when I made the post. It was not intended to be a jab a DARPA which I hold in high regard but a jab at Al Gore. Sorry for any distress I may have caused.
That and now they've claimed creating the internet when everbody knows it was Al Gore. Those rat bastards have no shame.
__
You mean you'll put down your rock, and I'll put down my sword and we'll try and kill each other like civilized people?
Oh my god, It's a basket woman and she's coming right for us! Shoot her Ned!
---
Now, you listen here! He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy! Now, go away!
No, it's not complicated at all.
This is the same reason that no software house will ever produce bug free products. If you make a perfect application that does the job then there's no incentive to upgrade. Build bugs in to products but no so severe that user won't use it. You can buy a lot more mini vans with bug laden code. Even put your kids through college.
Version 17.08.21r - Looks good!
M$FT doesn't have time to fix bugs. These problems are an annoyance and only after they have been taken to task time and time and time again - they have finally decided to do something about it. They have been rushing software out the door for so long that they don't know how to perform genuine quality control. M$FT is not a software company that makes money so much as it is a company that makes money by making software. Well, buying up other's software slapping on some lip stick and then putting it out as their own.
Bill Gates: "Leave us alone so we can innovate"
User: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Yes I read the article.
Perhaps I was thinking about one of the possible consequences of this line of research.
It does pose other ethical questions just on its on. From the very bottom of the article
_
Richard Doerflinger, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he felt certain that the human-rabbit embryos were human enough to deserve protections.
"I think because all the nuclear DNA is human," Doerflinger said, "we'd consider this an organism of the human species."
_
It begs one of the most basic questions of human existence: are we ghosts in the machine or are we purely material beings?
If we are ghosts in the machine then the bodies we inhabit are a temporary form of existence that will be transcended. So the risk for the future can not be in complete jeopardy regardless of what we do to the bodies of future generations.
From a materialist point of view I should think that this is more frightening. The very definition of self for future generations is potentially at stake. Genetic manipulation brought about the prospect of designer babies but that was generally limited to human DNA or even limited the potential to selecting which genetic traits a baby will have from it's parents (as in Gataca). But raises the specter of animal DNA getting in to the mix.
Perhaps it is too far off for you and I specifically to worry about but they day will come when these are real concerns. Perhaps sooner than later.
Or how fast comments about how fast rabbits multiply are multiplying.
Actually this is a bit terrifying. I don't believe the world is ready for genuine human/animal mixes. Image yourself (if these abominations can survive) as one of the poor creatures from the movie. As at least part human you would be a social creature. As at least part animal (if there are any physical or at least obvious psychological manifestations of your animal self) you would be an outcast and a freak. The best one could hope for is some meager acceptance through pity. That's not much of a life. Just because because one can do something doesn't mean that one should. Hopefully this type of DNA mixing and cloning will prove to be untenable if for now one else then at least for the sake of the individuals that may be produced this way.
How hard was it getting though Jr. High with normal sized ears and no fluffy tail ? Now at this to the mix and try to get a date for the sock hop! (NPI)
Make that two words: Spineless suckers.
Unless it's M$FT. Then the two words are: Silent partner.
--Given the boom in world population the rate has to be every 28 seconds by now.
A good solution is to make each voting machine stand alone and produce a human readable output in magnetic ink. This way the voter may check the results on the vote slip be fore turning it in. The vote reading machine would be something like a check sorter. If there's a problem with the results then the votes can be read by people and tallied by hand. This eliminates the hanging chad and other problems with punch cards and prevents hacking from an out side source. It also means that if someone wanted to rig the election they would need access to the vote reading machine which would be much more difficult as these would be much more tightly controlled. A bit 20th century perhaps but it produces a paper trail which every auditor likes to have.
To make it even easier for the voter the results could be color coded so that each party has its own traditional color. Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats, Green for Ralph Nadir, etc.
Example voting slip:
Offices for election:
President of the United States: Ralph Nadir (G)
Congressional District 2: Joe Bob Brigs (R)
Senate Seat: Samuel Adams (D)
State Constitutional Amendments
Proposition 7: Yes
so on and so forth...
Upgrades make money.
As a commercial software developer why would you ever produce a piece of software that is perfect? Once eveyone who wants a copy is happy with the copy they have then you're out of business. Just make the damn thing good enough. Then people will use it and then buy the bug fix upgrades once they've had enough of the bugs. While you're at it put in some extra features with the upgrade but make sure the new stuff has bugs too.
You'll be in business forever.
The first amendment was originally considered to cover political speech. The early writings of the constitutional framers particularly in the federalist papers will confirm this. Subsequently the courts have generally held that political speech is more protected than other forms of speech, like advertising. If free speech were universally protected then there would be no room for disclosure laws as applied to marketing. Take advertisements for prescription drugs, these ads must include side effects and must be accurate and not make claims which these drugs can not provide.
The other point to remember about the first amendment is it limits *Congress's* power to enact laws that abridge free speech. The subsequent amendment (the 14th) that many quote as applying these restrictions to the states is somewhat ambiguous and has a mixed bag of rulings from the courts on how to apply it to the states. The supreme court has been on a states rights tilt recently so they interpret the meaning of the 1st amendment in terms of how it is applied by the 14th to the state of Texas and decided that the pornography laws in Texas do not abridge the rights of free speech as pornography in the eyes of the courts and the law is considered worthless speech or speech of very little value. What constitutes pornography has changed over time but basically it has always been considered any sexually explicit material of little or no political, scientific or artistic worth.
If this comic book had portrayed president having sex with an intern and as a result having some sort of impact on the legal landscape then maybe an argument could have been made this is indeed political speech and therefore entitled to the highest level of protection.
While I generally hold that adults should be allowed to make their own choices there are consequences to the choices each individual makes each of which impacts the rest of society to varying degrees. It is our collective will as expressed through the political system to decide what choices we as a whole will tolerate. Here is an excellent link about the results of generally available pornography.
The XM29 is a dual use two component weapon. It uses the once despised and now accepted .223 round that the AR-10/15 M16 used. This part of the weapon may be fired with or with out the ballistics computer meaning that if for some reason all the electronic gadgets fail then the soldier at least has what he had before. For sniping the ballistics computer offers an automatically adjusted sight picture that computes the effects of bullet drop at long ranges. The other really cool bit that the build in ballistics computer offers is the ability to accurately shoot around corners or over the top of a protective burm. if youâ(TM)ve seen footage of soldiers holding their guns out over or around cover and shooting blindly in the generally direction of the enemy then you could imagine that same soldier using the build in camera on the gun to see (though the display on his helmet) what his gun is pointing at.
As for technological failure in the field, well that can happen, but this not Ms. Windows on a PC. There are complex systems that combat systems rely on now that if that system fail could mean the life of the operator. Most notably are the latest combat jets like the F18 or soon to come in to service Joint Strike fighter or even the F22. None of these planes can fly if their computers go down and most notably the F22 and the JSF are both aerodynamically unstable and with out constant corrections from the flight computer (several hundred per second) the plain would tumble though the air making ejection almost impossible. And this sort of reliance on technology is not limited to military applications either. If you have flown in an AirBus then you have been on a plane which if itâ(TM)s flight computer went dead then the plane would be un-flyable because the connections between the pilots controls (yoke, throttle, etc.) and the control surfaces (rudder, flaps, elevator, etc) and engines are relayed by computer down a communications wire to a embedded control devices (these run software too) that then makes the adjustments that pilot wants.
The post that referred to the difference between the 1000 meter and 400 meter range with respect to the XM29 and the M16 has to do with the grenade launcher that is build in to the MX29 and is an optional under slung add on to the M16. The add on for the M16 is a 40mm pump action launcher with a rotary magazine and because of the aiming sights is only accurate to 400 meters (with well develop skill with this weapon) the XM29 will have a 20 mm grenade with a build in micro chip that used in conjunction with the ballistics computer will allow the fired grenade to detonate with greater accuracy over the target.
With open software you can always find (or write) a browser that just won't play this junk. However, combine this with 'Next-Generation Secure Computing Base' (you really won't own your computer then) and you will someday see the unstoppable porn add from ugga boogga land (a far off country where nothing is regulated). I hope your kids or worse your wife doesn't walk in to the room while this thing goes off! Just try to explain that you didn't go looking for it and it's all a big misunderstanding. One that you can't replicate because the adds for the site you just found keep changing. Good luck and remember to keep your finger on the power switch.
The after market for ink jet printer cartridges just got smaller. Here's a link to a Register article about Lexmark, printer cartridges and the DCMA.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28811.html
There used to be a check on the price of printer cartridges in the form of competition. Now (with yet another abuse of the DCMA) it looks like Lexmark will eliminate its competitors. One can only expect the price on cartridges to go up.
What does this mean for you and me? Well, a quick check on the CompUSA web site shows that one can buy a brand new Lexmark Z45 Color Jet Printer for $86.74. On the same site the two replacement cartridges are $31.99 for black and $37.99 for color making the grand total on replacement cartridges a whopping $69.98 leaving $16.76 as the cost of the printer itself. So one can only conclude that a printer that costs this little can not be of high quality and durability. In the final analysis, those of use who buy low end ink jet printers will have to live with the fact that we are buying printer cartridges and the printers themselves are only a mechanism to utilize this expensive ink. The up side is this, when your cartridges run out you have the option of buying the next model of low end printers for very little marginal cost. Perhaps small recompense for so grand an outlay for ink.
I wonder, how much ink mass is in one of these print cartridges and how does the price by mass relate to that of silver or gold ? I am afraid to do the math and find out. Perhaps instead of buying into the precious metals market in times of economic down turn the smart investor may want to consider this market instead.
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.