Why is it okay to make a devices that singles out young people but not okay to make single out old people. Not to mention that it is a pretty crude device that is actively generating noise pollution.
I wonder how a low frequency sound device, for the purposes of keeping old people from loitering on my storefront, would fly? Old people mind sounds loud enough to physically agitate them far more than young people, so you would have a crude analogy to this device, except it discriminates in reverse. The sound would be similar to playing drums really loud, except only sub-acoustical frequencies are used.
The copyright holders would have to sue to nail Sony over illegal IP copying. It's also a more esoteric concept and people don't understand copyright as well as having computers trashed by some nefarious code.
Also, some or many of the copied programs violate some of Sony's patents (Sony holds MPEG-related patents), and Sony undoubtably would use that as a threat to drop any lawsuits the open source authors might be thinking of.
Lastly, Sony is a big company, and the lawsuits that have been filed so far are long shots (and likely will be settled for a truck-load of half-price Sony CDs). Copyright law is very strongly pro-established corporation and requires a large amount of cash to fund a lawsuit.
It's called the law of large numbers. If a little digging unveils 1,000 patent violations, it's likely that a little more digging would have uncovered more. They're unknown because the violations have not actually be found and written into a list. Some patents are even secret and not published until they are issued, and no amount of research (short of industrial espionage) is going to find them. A large program is like playing minesweeper with a blindfold. Each line of a code is a square, which potentially could violate a patent. Uncover enough squares (the average number is not very high, probably under 100 lines of code), and you will find a mine. MPlayer consists of around 1,000,000 lines of code implementing hundreds of audiovisual algorithms, and certain parts of MPlayer, like wavelet-based codecs (ie., the Snow and Dirac codecs), have been avoided by all US-based and international corporations because of the patent mess surrounding wavelets (in particular, the fragmented and litigious nature of the patent holders, not so much the raw number of patents). If a project is extremely careful, then they might be able to avoid 99 of 100 patents through very careful research (easily exceeding development costs), but that still means about 1 line in 10,000 will be infringing, or 100 infringments for a program of the scale of MPlayer. Perhaps using a bitfield to store 8 1-bit pixels in 1 byte is patented and a careless optimizer introduced that into the code naively trying to save a few bytes.
It's just as safe to say that there are yet to be discovered patent violations in (insert name of large software project) as it is safe to say that at least a single extra reservoir of oil will be found or that you will find at least one mine by clicking randomly on the squares in minesweeper and that you will undoubtedly lose with that strategy.
I can see reasons for requiring the full MS Windows source. How do you know that Diebold isn't using a rootkit or a security flaw to hide some nefariousness (of which thousands exist on any given build of MS Windows). With the Windows source, one could see what that particular undocumented OS call does, or why the program is making use of a file called $sys$change_votes, or what a particular OS modification is doing (is it a driver for some special hardware, or does it also include a trojan a la Sony?).
Even this is a pretty lousy compromise, as actually inspecting such a complex system isn't going to be easy. What is made to look like a data might really be exploit code to be inserted into the operating system, and a system as complex as MS Windows has plenty of openings to do this with.
The best solution is to have the thing run on a minimalist OS or no OS at all. All it is doing is counting votes, so all it needs is a boot medium (a ROM is probably the most practical from both a cost and a security point of view), a printer for printing out an audit trail, radio buttons or levers for user input [with the ballot overlayed on the levers, like in current mechanical voting machines, to minimize voter confusion], a few hundred bytes of RAM, some way of getting data out electronically, and a calculator processor (like the 8088). The device should be simple enough that a gate-by-gate analysis would be doable and a handful of chips should be randomly selected from real machines and the physical chip be inspected destructively.
Output could be stored on audio tape (like on early computer systems), which would give massive forensics evidence should there be an investigation (the writes to the tape are done after each vote is recorded, and physical properties of the 1's and 0's will vary according to the timing of the writes - a foresics lab should be able to determine if the paper trail matches the physical record of the tape, which would be pretty hard to fake since it is the physical tape that is analysized, not so much the data on it - things like humidity, temperature, the fingerprint of the writer, the timing and contents of writes, and even the local magnetic field would have to be replicated). With this system, even a faked paper trail would be very hard to pull off, as creating the matching tape will require a very skilled detective/scientist, time, and expensive hardware, as opposed to just any old poll worker loyal to your cause. The write head of the tape drive would have to be taken from the machine, wired up to the faking device, the tape made, and the head replaced into the voting machine.
Free wireless internet access gives enormous bang for the buck compared to housing, and it will be a draw for business and residents. If I was considering moving there, free internet would be about the same draw as lowering the house price by $5,000 to $10,000. Giving a $5,000 per house subsidy will be far more expensive than laying out an inexpensive but very usefull wireless system.
I feel that technology should be a valid excuse under the right circumstances. A mom-and-pop store or a private individual cannot reasonable be expected to do a good faith patent search when choosing an operating system (MS Windows and Mac OS undoubtedly violate hundreds of software patents, and Linux violates thousands of patents if you include software commonly found in distros, like mp3 players - the mplayer project alone has close to 1,000 known patent violations and countless unknown violations). Legally every single user of a halfway modern OS should have injunctions granted against the use of their computer and massive damages be paid out to the dozens or hundreds of patent holders covering some aspect of their OS.
In the case of operating systems, even Microsoft should be able to invoke ignorance, as the best minds money could buy cannot properly figure out exactly what a patent covers, and even if they could, proper enforcement would result in losses to GDP easily exceeding 20% as companies retool to avoid the use of computers and replace them with typewriters and file cabinets (typing and data storage), servos and relays (industrial processes, automobiles, microwaves, anything else currently built with computers). On top of increased staffing needs for most corporations, energy efficiency will decline as the carbeurator will replace fuel injection in autos and electric power plants retool to manual operations (certain plants, like many solar plants and photovoltaic systems, are likely to be entirely unoperable and mothballed). Efficiency might be maintained by switching to turbine-based engines (say, steam turbines or gas turbines), but such a switch would drastically increase the cost and complexity of automobiles. Telephone companies in particular will have to hire many switchboard operators and we can expect to see call costs rise back to pre-AT&T breakup costs. A modern Cold War-style military such are our own is dependant on computers from everything from remote control drones to fighter planes to secure and rapid communications. And lastly, Slashdot would not be possible without computers.
That said, I feel that Sony is entirely responsible for what they did as they should have known better. Trojan horses being no-nos is just plain common sense and they serve no legitamite purpose. Sony purposefully wrote or purchased a program to have this function, and as Sony is in the software business they can be expected to be authorities on the subject and act accordingly (as opposed to patents which require substantial knowledge in law just to understand, no less safely navigate - and the cost of compliance is so high that no reasonable corporation can be expected to fully comply with them as it would entail disbanding the corporation in many instances)
I'm not boycotting Nintendo. I just don't like them, but not to the point of a company-wide boycott (doing so would leave me out of console supplies too).
What I didn't like about Pokemon is "gotta buy them all." I don't remember anything half as crass when I was a kid, and I lived through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Freeciv is available. Similar to Civ II/Civ III. Much better multiplayer since it is better balanced. Graphics aren't as good, but who needs graphics for a strategy game?
And there's always WINE (or one of the commercial mods of it, like Cedega). Most games (about 2/3rds of the ones I've tried) run on it just fine, though a lot of 'educational' titles run very poorly because of shoddy programming (not that they run too great on native windows either). Heck, with the Caillou games, there's plenty of older kids with the Macromedia Flash skills to make those games which are apparently sold for real $$$ in stores, and my caps of the same TV show Caillou look better (and are at a lower bitrate) than the stuff in the game. And those are caps, which have gone through a digital->analogue->broadcast->digital cycle and have needed the TV logos to be removed. A professional game company should be able to do better.
I would consider just about any strategy game to be "okay for all ages", though I wouldn't expect young kids to get much entertainment out of them.
They shouldn't care, but likewise they shouldn't care about anything I do in private in an ideal libertarian world. But this is real life. Gaming habits are similar to library records in terms of how sensitive they are. What if violent video games go the way of the drug wars?
The take from games is very substantial. It's about 25% of the gross price for third party games. While I don't see Microsoft making great profits anytime soon, it won't be making large never-ending losses either. Microsoft is after market share, and as they gain it, they'll get even better leverage and they'll be able to raise the gross percentage, and probably the selling price of games too.
The early release date probably will be enough to win a hefty chunk of market share, and knowing Microsoft, there's no stopping them once they get a foot into the door. The only market where their gains have been contained is in the server OS market, and that's only because they have competition from a far superior AND free operating system. Seeing as Sony is the rootkit and DRM king and definitely NOT willing to give away games and the OS for free without any advertising and full source code, I see Microsoft running over them like a steam roller. If XBox II doesn't work, Microsoft always has another chance, and another, until they finally get it right.
The vast majority of arrests are for drugs, not violent crimes or white collar crimes. Usage rates are nearly identical among blacks and whites for marijuana and all_drugs_combined (individual drugs do have differences, with Blacks predominantly abusing crack cocaine, and whites abusing powdered cocaine, but in total, the fraction of whites addicted to hard drugs is similar to the fraction of blacks).
No idea what the statistics are for murder, but murderers are a tiny (1%) fraction of the prison population, so it is not significant.
Either way, you can be sure that Microsoft (or any console maker) will set their launch date a full year ahead of what would be needed to ensure a quality product. They figure (quite correctly, unless the crashes are very frequent to the point of making the console unplayable) that the extremely image conscious video game market will reward speed to market over quality. Personally I will be opting out of the latest set of console releases. I don't have enough time to make use of a new console purchase and I'm either boycotting the console maker (Sony and Microsoft), or I hold the maker in very low esteem (Nintendo, for bringing us Pokemon and thus refining price gouging and bringing marketing to a new level). $400/unit isn't exactly a bargain basement price. I'm also paranoid about anything with wireless networking (that it'll have FBI or general purpose backdoors), so that's another strike. None of these corps would even think twice about installing backdoors (Microsoft and Sony have been doing this for years, and I don't see Nintendo as a bastion of consumer rights).
Sure is fast I must say. About 200-250 ms load time vs as long as 10 seconds (mostly rendering time, not download time) for some news sites and other ill-designed sites.
And I have a fast (1.8 GHz processor running Konqueror) setup and broadband. I can just imaging the difference if I was on an old sub-GHz machine or on dial up. I'm also using Konqueror. For the odd site that doesn't work (forcing me to resort to Firefox), the render time is substantially increased.
Seeing how the US condones prison labor, why not force them to clean up the spyware from every Texas computer that got the stuff while in their Texas-style Super Max prison. Just cleaning up the government computers should take a few life consecutive life terms.
But you are right. The odds of you going to jail are inversely proportional to your wealth and directly proportional to the blackness of your skin, so they won't be getting any jail time, let alone maximum security or forced labor.
The fraction of hijackers and bombers is closer to 100 per trillion, or about 1/10,000th the number you are using. Using 14% false positive, then you have about 100 hijackers and bombers (true positives) for each 140,000,000,000 false positives. Even a large international airport can expect to go through 100 years without having a single hijacker try to get through.
I'd rather see the funds spent against the obvious mass-scale terrorists... the United States of America. In a month, the US military will have killed a number of civilians similar to the total number killed by airplane hijackers, bombers, and terrorists, and that is assuming the 9/11 was in fact the fault of terrorists (A designed collapse of NORAD coupled with plenty of strategically placed explosives in the first, second, and seventh WTC buildings seems more believable, considering the pictures, the design of the buildings, and the long length of time between the planes being hijacked and them crashing).
Yeah, but at least having some competition has reigned in the price. I was surprised when I was shopping this year to see that the nominal prices of LEGO blocks are cheaper than when I was a kid (that's not counting for inflation) and the Mega Blocks are even cheaper.
This seems to be the trend with all toys. Generic or interchangable toys (like building blocks) are cheaper, while branded or IP-based toys (video games, action figures from TV shows, etc) keep getting pricier. My guess is that it's based to more effective marketing (improved advertisements and more extensive use of class-based marketing and pricing are the main changes I've noticed).
Ignorance typically lets you avoid punitive damages, but little else.
In this case, I find even that hard to swallow, considering the hard line that Sony has taken against consumer rights and the volume of CDs that were made (thus at least a cursory check could be done at minimal cost to Sony). Although the rootkit might not be obvious at first sight (it wouldn't for me, since I don't know much about how Windows works), the phone-home functionality definitely would, as it would make highly suspicious outbound IP requests. Considering that the software has root priviledges (it must, since by definition a rootkit is applied after you gain root), there is no limit as to what their subcontractor could be hiding in the packets, so just the presence of phoning home encrypted packets would in itself be a total abdication of their responsibility.
At least they're nice and honest and admit that it's a non-renewable resource. They talk about an estimated reserve of at least 50 years and their depletion rate. They also don't use the word 'sustainable' that many people attach to geothermal energy.
The only thing I would like in addition is what is the production in GW*h/year? They mention peak of 1.1GW, but that implies just a 1.1GW turbine. My guess is that the geothermal energy is easily throttled, so they run it as a peaking plant to get the most bang for their calorie and that it doesn't make nearly as much GW*h/year as a 1.1GW coal or nuclear facility.
Unfortunately, the Earth is a great insulator. Heat from the mantle travels exceeding slowly to the surface. The maximum sustainable power density is many orders (at least three, probably more) of magnitude less than solar power. The unsustainable (deplete once) energy reserve is exceedingly dilute compared to fossil fuels. I haven't had time to do some hard math, but my gut feeling is that drawing out 8GW of heat energy will cool off a lot of rock real fast. (assupmtions are 15% rankine cycle and 12.5% net efficiency and a 1GW plant). How many cubic kilometers of rock can their collection system honestly cover?
Iceland has a much larger (though still finite) sustainable energy density, since it sits on the mid-oceanic rift, so it would be a far better site for a geothermal plant, though I have my doubts that 1GW could be extracted even from that island.
Scaling materials do not harm the environment and generally be disposed of like sand. The corrosive materials are safe to dump in small amounts over the millenia as nature slowly weathers rock formations, but I do think that the liquid would have to be pumped back into the rock formation to avoid contamination. (isn't that what they do already?)
If it's really a problem (probably not), one can always use a closed cycle, which will avoid contamination issues at an increase in cost.
The bigger drawback to geothermal energy is that it is non-renewable on the human timescale. Heat moves very slowly through the earth, and eventually, the local hot spots in the crust will be cooled down. It also show far less potential for future cost reduction than wind or solar. Considering Australia has excellent solar resources and good wind resources, why not develop those?
If the speed limits are properly set according to engineering priciples, 15 over a 70 limit is about as dangerous than 15 over a 30 limit. 30 would be a prudent limit for a particularly narrow residential street. 70 would be a prudent limit for highways in suburban areas. The risk of crashing is higher at local road speeds, but a crash at highway speeds is much more likely to result in a fatality than a crash at local road speeds.
Traffic jams are the most common source of accidents (per mile driven), but result in extremely few fatalities. The average speed of impact is under 5 mph, or just enough to cause a few thousand in bumper repairs on new cars (or zero in damage to an old clunker where you cannot notice the new dent in the rear fender).
Maybe in your country, but where I live (USA), getting caught stealing cars is some serious time. Right up there with kidnapping and copyright infringement.
In one very famous case in California, a person was incarcerated for life for stealing a bicycle (which is a felony). The three strikes law over there means that a third felony leads to life in prison. His other two crimes were stealing another bike and stealing a car. Kidnappers generally don't get life in prison, though a repeat or particularly brutal kidnapping might.
You're lucky to have 65 as your limit. Here on Long Island the limit is no higher than 55 mph on any superhighway. Even the right lane slow-pokes do at least 55 mph. Left lane and HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes generally move at 75-80 mph when the road is open. 55 is asking to be rear-ended by cars moving with the flow of traffic, or more likely by a person speeding and doing 90-100 while weaving through traffic and mis-judging your speed. Even though the other is at fault, it's still an accident that you could have avoided by going as fast as the average car is going.
It's been shown statistically that the safest speed is the median speed of the other cars on the highway. The risk of accident and death rises rapidly as you go further away from this speed. With a 65 mph average speed, your risk of death is similar at 0 mph (a sitting duck in a busy highway) as at 130 mph (weaving in and out of traffic with a death wish). The former also forces people to do high speed and very risky maneuvers to avoid you.
PS: This is only true on superhighways and other places where you are far more likely to crash into another car AND there is a physical divider between you and the traffic going the other way, for small roads, going too slow is safer than too fast, though just right is still safest.
On an aside, I personally wish that I could do 55 safely. Fuel efficiency at 70 mph is easily 20% lower than at 55, and I'm almost never in a rush to get anywhere. If it had autopilot, I usually wouldn't mind doing 40 if it saved another 20% gas and I had an internet-ready laptop.
PPS: I am completely ignoring all the privacy implications. They easily trump the imagined increase in safety in imposing low speed limits, but everybody seems to be in agreement over that, so it's a moot point.
IANAL, but judging from the RIAA's press releases when they sue grannies and kids, it's per copy and per work. So let's do the math. 20CD * 1 million copies each * $150,000/copy = $3 trillion dollars. That's if there's only 1 work on each copy. If they also infringed on several other projects, then you would have to multiply the damages accordingly.
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Why is it okay to make a devices that singles out young people but not okay to make single out old people. Not to mention that it is a pretty crude device that is actively generating noise pollution.
I wonder how a low frequency sound device, for the purposes of keeping old people from loitering on my storefront, would fly? Old people mind sounds loud enough to physically agitate them far more than young people, so you would have a crude analogy to this device, except it discriminates in reverse. The sound would be similar to playing drums really loud, except only sub-acoustical frequencies are used.
The copyright holders would have to sue to nail Sony over illegal IP copying. It's also a more esoteric concept and people don't understand copyright as well as having computers trashed by some nefarious code.
Also, some or many of the copied programs violate some of Sony's patents (Sony holds MPEG-related patents), and Sony undoubtably would use that as a threat to drop any lawsuits the open source authors might be thinking of.
Lastly, Sony is a big company, and the lawsuits that have been filed so far are long shots (and likely will be settled for a truck-load of half-price Sony CDs). Copyright law is very strongly pro-established corporation and requires a large amount of cash to fund a lawsuit.
The doubling time is a mere ln(2)/.07 or ~9.9021 years assuming continuous compounding.
It's called the law of large numbers. If a little digging unveils 1,000 patent violations, it's likely that a little more digging would have uncovered more. They're unknown because the violations have not actually be found and written into a list. Some patents are even secret and not published until they are issued, and no amount of research (short of industrial espionage) is going to find them. A large program is like playing minesweeper with a blindfold. Each line of a code is a square, which potentially could violate a patent. Uncover enough squares (the average number is not very high, probably under 100 lines of code), and you will find a mine. MPlayer consists of around 1,000,000 lines of code implementing hundreds of audiovisual algorithms, and certain parts of MPlayer, like wavelet-based codecs (ie., the Snow and Dirac codecs), have been avoided by all US-based and international corporations because of the patent mess surrounding wavelets (in particular, the fragmented and litigious nature of the patent holders, not so much the raw number of patents). If a project is extremely careful, then they might be able to avoid 99 of 100 patents through very careful research (easily exceeding development costs), but that still means about 1 line in 10,000 will be infringing, or 100 infringments for a program of the scale of MPlayer. Perhaps using a bitfield to store 8 1-bit pixels in 1 byte is patented and a careless optimizer introduced that into the code naively trying to save a few bytes.
It's just as safe to say that there are yet to be discovered patent violations in (insert name of large software project) as it is safe to say that at least a single extra reservoir of oil will be found or that you will find at least one mine by clicking randomly on the squares in minesweeper and that you will undoubtedly lose with that strategy.
I can see reasons for requiring the full MS Windows source. How do you know that Diebold isn't using a rootkit or a security flaw to hide some nefariousness (of which thousands exist on any given build of MS Windows). With the Windows source, one could see what that particular undocumented OS call does, or why the program is making use of a file called $sys$change_votes, or what a particular OS modification is doing (is it a driver for some special hardware, or does it also include a trojan a la Sony?).
Even this is a pretty lousy compromise, as actually inspecting such a complex system isn't going to be easy. What is made to look like a data might really be exploit code to be inserted into the operating system, and a system as complex as MS Windows has plenty of openings to do this with.
The best solution is to have the thing run on a minimalist OS or no OS at all. All it is doing is counting votes, so all it needs is a boot medium (a ROM is probably the most practical from both a cost and a security point of view), a printer for printing out an audit trail, radio buttons or levers for user input [with the ballot overlayed on the levers, like in current mechanical voting machines, to minimize voter confusion], a few hundred bytes of RAM, some way of getting data out electronically, and a calculator processor (like the 8088). The device should be simple enough that a gate-by-gate analysis would be doable and a handful of chips should be randomly selected from real machines and the physical chip be inspected destructively.
Output could be stored on audio tape (like on early computer systems), which would give massive forensics evidence should there be an investigation (the writes to the tape are done after each vote is recorded, and physical properties of the 1's and 0's will vary according to the timing of the writes - a foresics lab should be able to determine if the paper trail matches the physical record of the tape, which would be pretty hard to fake since it is the physical tape that is analysized, not so much the data on it - things like humidity, temperature, the fingerprint of the writer, the timing and contents of writes, and even the local magnetic field would have to be replicated). With this system, even a faked paper trail would be very hard to pull off, as creating the matching tape will require a very skilled detective/scientist, time, and expensive hardware, as opposed to just any old poll worker loyal to your cause. The write head of the tape drive would have to be taken from the machine, wired up to the faking device, the tape made, and the head replaced into the voting machine.
Free wireless internet access gives enormous bang for the buck compared to housing, and it will be a draw for business and residents. If I was considering moving there, free internet would be about the same draw as lowering the house price by $5,000 to $10,000. Giving a $5,000 per house subsidy will be far more expensive than laying out an inexpensive but very usefull wireless system.
I feel that technology should be a valid excuse under the right circumstances. A mom-and-pop store or a private individual cannot reasonable be expected to do a good faith patent search when choosing an operating system (MS Windows and Mac OS undoubtedly violate hundreds of software patents, and Linux violates thousands of patents if you include software commonly found in distros, like mp3 players - the mplayer project alone has close to 1,000 known patent violations and countless unknown violations). Legally every single user of a halfway modern OS should have injunctions granted against the use of their computer and massive damages be paid out to the dozens or hundreds of patent holders covering some aspect of their OS.
In the case of operating systems, even Microsoft should be able to invoke ignorance, as the best minds money could buy cannot properly figure out exactly what a patent covers, and even if they could, proper enforcement would result in losses to GDP easily exceeding 20% as companies retool to avoid the use of computers and replace them with typewriters and file cabinets (typing and data storage), servos and relays (industrial processes, automobiles, microwaves, anything else currently built with computers). On top of increased staffing needs for most corporations, energy efficiency will decline as the carbeurator will replace fuel injection in autos and electric power plants retool to manual operations (certain plants, like many solar plants and photovoltaic systems, are likely to be entirely unoperable and mothballed). Efficiency might be maintained by switching to turbine-based engines (say, steam turbines or gas turbines), but such a switch would drastically increase the cost and complexity of automobiles. Telephone companies in particular will have to hire many switchboard operators and we can expect to see call costs rise back to pre-AT&T breakup costs. A modern Cold War-style military such are our own is dependant on computers from everything from remote control drones to fighter planes to secure and rapid communications. And lastly, Slashdot would not be possible without computers.
That said, I feel that Sony is entirely responsible for what they did as they should have known better. Trojan horses being no-nos is just plain common sense and they serve no legitamite purpose. Sony purposefully wrote or purchased a program to have this function, and as Sony is in the software business they can be expected to be authorities on the subject and act accordingly (as opposed to patents which require substantial knowledge in law just to understand, no less safely navigate - and the cost of compliance is so high that no reasonable corporation can be expected to fully comply with them as it would entail disbanding the corporation in many instances)
I'm not boycotting Nintendo. I just don't like them, but not to the point of a company-wide boycott (doing so would leave me out of console supplies too).
What I didn't like about Pokemon is "gotta buy them all." I don't remember anything half as crass when I was a kid, and I lived through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Freeciv is available. Similar to Civ II/Civ III. Much better multiplayer since it is better balanced. Graphics aren't as good, but who needs graphics for a strategy game?
And there's always WINE (or one of the commercial mods of it, like Cedega). Most games (about 2/3rds of the ones I've tried) run on it just fine, though a lot of 'educational' titles run very poorly because of shoddy programming (not that they run too great on native windows either). Heck, with the Caillou games, there's plenty of older kids with the Macromedia Flash skills to make those games which are apparently sold for real $$$ in stores, and my caps of the same TV show Caillou look better (and are at a lower bitrate) than the stuff in the game. And those are caps, which have gone through a digital->analogue->broadcast->digital cycle and have needed the TV logos to be removed. A professional game company should be able to do better.
I would consider just about any strategy game to be "okay for all ages", though I wouldn't expect young kids to get much entertainment out of them.
They shouldn't care, but likewise they shouldn't care about anything I do in private in an ideal libertarian world. But this is real life. Gaming habits are similar to library records in terms of how sensitive they are. What if violent video games go the way of the drug wars?
The take from games is very substantial. It's about 25% of the gross price for third party games. While I don't see Microsoft making great profits anytime soon, it won't be making large never-ending losses either. Microsoft is after market share, and as they gain it, they'll get even better leverage and they'll be able to raise the gross percentage, and probably the selling price of games too.
The early release date probably will be enough to win a hefty chunk of market share, and knowing Microsoft, there's no stopping them once they get a foot into the door. The only market where their gains have been contained is in the server OS market, and that's only because they have competition from a far superior AND free operating system. Seeing as Sony is the rootkit and DRM king and definitely NOT willing to give away games and the OS for free without any advertising and full source code, I see Microsoft running over them like a steam roller. If XBox II doesn't work, Microsoft always has another chance, and another, until they finally get it right.
The vast majority of arrests are for drugs, not violent crimes or white collar crimes. Usage rates are nearly identical among blacks and whites for marijuana and all_drugs_combined (individual drugs do have differences, with Blacks predominantly abusing crack cocaine, and whites abusing powdered cocaine, but in total, the fraction of whites addicted to hard drugs is similar to the fraction of blacks).
No idea what the statistics are for murder, but murderers are a tiny (1%) fraction of the prison population, so it is not significant.
Either way, you can be sure that Microsoft (or any console maker) will set their launch date a full year ahead of what would be needed to ensure a quality product. They figure (quite correctly, unless the crashes are very frequent to the point of making the console unplayable) that the extremely image conscious video game market will reward speed to market over quality. Personally I will be opting out of the latest set of console releases. I don't have enough time to make use of a new console purchase and I'm either boycotting the console maker (Sony and Microsoft), or I hold the maker in very low esteem (Nintendo, for bringing us Pokemon and thus refining price gouging and bringing marketing to a new level). $400/unit isn't exactly a bargain basement price. I'm also paranoid about anything with wireless networking (that it'll have FBI or general purpose backdoors), so that's another strike. None of these corps would even think twice about installing backdoors (Microsoft and Sony have been doing this for years, and I don't see Nintendo as a bastion of consumer rights).
Sure is fast I must say. About 200-250 ms load time vs as long as 10 seconds (mostly rendering time, not download time) for some news sites and other ill-designed sites.
And I have a fast (1.8 GHz processor running Konqueror) setup and broadband. I can just imaging the difference if I was on an old sub-GHz machine or on dial up. I'm also using Konqueror. For the odd site that doesn't work (forcing me to resort to Firefox), the render time is substantially increased.
Seeing how the US condones prison labor, why not force them to clean up the spyware from every Texas computer that got the stuff while in their Texas-style Super Max prison. Just cleaning up the government computers should take a few life consecutive life terms.
But you are right. The odds of you going to jail are inversely proportional to your wealth and directly proportional to the blackness of your skin, so they won't be getting any jail time, let alone maximum security or forced labor.
The fraction of hijackers and bombers is closer to 100 per trillion, or about 1/10,000th the number you are using. Using 14% false positive, then you have about 100 hijackers and bombers (true positives) for each 140,000,000,000 false positives. Even a large international airport can expect to go through 100 years without having a single hijacker try to get through.
... the United States of America. In a month, the US military will have killed a number of civilians similar to the total number killed by airplane hijackers, bombers, and terrorists, and that is assuming the 9/11 was in fact the fault of terrorists (A designed collapse of NORAD coupled with plenty of strategically placed explosives in the first, second, and seventh WTC buildings seems more believable, considering the pictures, the design of the buildings, and the long length of time between the planes being hijacked and them crashing).
I'd rather see the funds spent against the obvious mass-scale terrorists
Yeah, but at least having some competition has reigned in the price. I was surprised when I was shopping this year to see that the nominal prices of LEGO blocks are cheaper than when I was a kid (that's not counting for inflation) and the Mega Blocks are even cheaper.
This seems to be the trend with all toys. Generic or interchangable toys (like building blocks) are cheaper, while branded or IP-based toys (video games, action figures from TV shows, etc) keep getting pricier. My guess is that it's based to more effective marketing (improved advertisements and more extensive use of class-based marketing and pricing are the main changes I've noticed).
Ignorance typically lets you avoid punitive damages, but little else.
In this case, I find even that hard to swallow, considering the hard line that Sony has taken against consumer rights and the volume of CDs that were made (thus at least a cursory check could be done at minimal cost to Sony). Although the rootkit might not be obvious at first sight (it wouldn't for me, since I don't know much about how Windows works), the phone-home functionality definitely would, as it would make highly suspicious outbound IP requests. Considering that the software has root priviledges (it must, since by definition a rootkit is applied after you gain root), there is no limit as to what their subcontractor could be hiding in the packets, so just the presence of phoning home encrypted packets would in itself be a total abdication of their responsibility.
At least they're nice and honest and admit that it's a non-renewable resource. They talk about an estimated reserve of at least 50 years and their depletion rate. They also don't use the word 'sustainable' that many people attach to geothermal energy.
The only thing I would like in addition is what is the production in GW*h/year? They mention peak of 1.1GW, but that implies just a 1.1GW turbine. My guess is that the geothermal energy is easily throttled, so they run it as a peaking plant to get the most bang for their calorie and that it doesn't make nearly as much GW*h/year as a 1.1GW coal or nuclear facility.
Unfortunately, the Earth is a great insulator. Heat from the mantle travels exceeding slowly to the surface. The maximum sustainable power density is many orders (at least three, probably more) of magnitude less than solar power. The unsustainable (deplete once) energy reserve is exceedingly dilute compared to fossil fuels. I haven't had time to do some hard math, but my gut feeling is that drawing out 8GW of heat energy will cool off a lot of rock real fast. (assupmtions are 15% rankine cycle and 12.5% net efficiency and a 1GW plant). How many cubic kilometers of rock can their collection system honestly cover?
Iceland has a much larger (though still finite) sustainable energy density, since it sits on the mid-oceanic rift, so it would be a far better site for a geothermal plant, though I have my doubts that 1GW could be extracted even from that island.
Scaling materials do not harm the environment and generally be disposed of like sand. The corrosive materials are safe to dump in small amounts over the millenia as nature slowly weathers rock formations, but I do think that the liquid would have to be pumped back into the rock formation to avoid contamination. (isn't that what they do already?)
If it's really a problem (probably not), one can always use a closed cycle, which will avoid contamination issues at an increase in cost.
The bigger drawback to geothermal energy is that it is non-renewable on the human timescale. Heat moves very slowly through the earth, and eventually, the local hot spots in the crust will be cooled down. It also show far less potential for future cost reduction than wind or solar. Considering Australia has excellent solar resources and good wind resources, why not develop those?
If the speed limits are properly set according to engineering priciples, 15 over a 70 limit is about as dangerous than 15 over a 30 limit. 30 would be a prudent limit for a particularly narrow residential street. 70 would be a prudent limit for highways in suburban areas. The risk of crashing is higher at local road speeds, but a crash at highway speeds is much more likely to result in a fatality than a crash at local road speeds.
Traffic jams are the most common source of accidents (per mile driven), but result in extremely few fatalities. The average speed of impact is under 5 mph, or just enough to cause a few thousand in bumper repairs on new cars (or zero in damage to an old clunker where you cannot notice the new dent in the rear fender).
Maybe in your country, but where I live (USA), getting caught stealing cars is some serious time. Right up there with kidnapping and copyright infringement.
In one very famous case in California, a person was incarcerated for life for stealing a bicycle (which is a felony). The three strikes law over there means that a third felony leads to life in prison. His other two crimes were stealing another bike and stealing a car. Kidnappers generally don't get life in prison, though a repeat or particularly brutal kidnapping might.
You're lucky to have 65 as your limit. Here on Long Island the limit is no higher than 55 mph on any superhighway. Even the right lane slow-pokes do at least 55 mph. Left lane and HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes generally move at 75-80 mph when the road is open. 55 is asking to be rear-ended by cars moving with the flow of traffic, or more likely by a person speeding and doing 90-100 while weaving through traffic and mis-judging your speed. Even though the other is at fault, it's still an accident that you could have avoided by going as fast as the average car is going.
It's been shown statistically that the safest speed is the median speed of the other cars on the highway. The risk of accident and death rises rapidly as you go further away from this speed. With a 65 mph average speed, your risk of death is similar at 0 mph (a sitting duck in a busy highway) as at 130 mph (weaving in and out of traffic with a death wish). The former also forces people to do high speed and very risky maneuvers to avoid you.
PS: This is only true on superhighways and other places where you are far more likely to crash into another car AND there is a physical divider between you and the traffic going the other way, for small roads, going too slow is safer than too fast, though just right is still safest.
On an aside, I personally wish that I could do 55 safely. Fuel efficiency at 70 mph is easily 20% lower than at 55, and I'm almost never in a rush to get anywhere. If it had autopilot, I usually wouldn't mind doing 40 if it saved another 20% gas and I had an internet-ready laptop.
PPS: I am completely ignoring all the privacy implications. They easily trump the imagined increase in safety in imposing low speed limits, but everybody seems to be in agreement over that, so it's a moot point.
IANAL, but judging from the RIAA's press releases when they sue grannies and kids, it's per copy and per work. So let's do the math. 20CD * 1 million copies each * $150,000/copy = $3 trillion dollars. That's if there's only 1 work on each copy. If they also infringed on several other projects, then you would have to multiply the damages accordingly.