yet in spite of your dire hypotheticals, the world's technology is totally amazing right now and better than ever.
Except for periods of technological regression, your statement holds true for any moment in history. We're not concerned about the state of technological progress here, we're concerned about the rate of technological progress. The argument for patent reform is that without these sorts of patent fights draining tech companies of money and stifling innovation, the world's technology would be even more amazing and better than it is right now.
Copyright law allows up to $150,000 per violation to discourage commercial copyright infringement. That's when someone makes a bootleg CD and sells a tens of thousands of copies for few bucks each. What happens in this case is that the bootlegger is liable for (say) 15 tracks x $150,000 each. But in the process, this indemnifies all his customers. The CDs they bought aren't real, they're contraband. But because the ringleader behind the whole thing was caught and punished, and restitution made to the IP owners, they get to keep their CDs and are not liable to be sued for owning contraband.
What happens in filesharing is quite different. Say you share a song with 10,000 people. For a judgement approaching the $150,000 per song max to make sense, punishing you with that fine has to indemnify all those people you shared with. Otherwise you can fine Tenenbaum $22,500 for making 10,000 copies of a song, but you can also fine each of the 10,000 people he shared with $22,500 each for making the same song available to each other. Thus netting the record company a potential $225 million for 10,000 copies whereas in the bootleg CD case they could only net $150,000 for the 10,000 copies.
This country really needs to pass a copyright law which distinguishes between these two cases. The current copyright statutes make sense for commercial copyright infringement when there's a single perpetrator behind it all. A new copyright statute needs to be made to cover cases of peer-to-peer filesharing, which recognizes that 10,000 people sharing a sing with each other means each person on average only made 1 copy. Punishment needs to reflect that average, meaning something on the order of $100 should be adequate. Either that or limit copyright holders to suing one and only one filesharer per song, ever. Right now, we're allowing record companies to sue 10,000 people on the basis of making 100 million copies, even though only 10,000 copies were ever made.
Long-term, I think this is the future. Processing and storage will move to your phone (well, critical storage and backups might go onto the cloud, or a home server). Your "tablet" will become a display which interfaces wirelessly with your phone. Your "laptop" will become a keyboard which interfaces wireless with your phone, which is interfacing wireless with your "tablet".
If you know you're going to be doing a lot of typing and mousing, you'll bring the display, keyboard, and mouse along with your phone.
If you know you're mostly just going to be viewing data, you'll just bring the display along with your phone.
If you know you're not going to really need the computer, you'll just bring along your phone. Your data is still accessible should you happen to need it.
It's a little ironic that developing countries will experience this before modernized countries, but a similar thing happened with wireless telecom. Modernized countries already had entrenched wired telecom networks, so wireless was just an option. Developing countries had no networks, and wireless networks were a lot cheaper to build, so they built (relatively) extensive wireless telecom networks.
Just a business and occupation tax which varies by industry. In most cases it's about 1% of revenue, which is pretty business-friendly.
Oregon has a two-tiered corporate income tax, which tops out at 7.9% of profit over $250k. Web-based services usually have low expenses, so there's not much difference between revenue and profit, making Washington the clear winner.
That's what I was thinking. A SATA/USB3 adapter I bought has a jumper to make the drive read-only. That got me thinking - why can't we have a hardware toggle switch to make the boot drive read-only? You can't root it if you can't modify any of the bootable system files, or if you do manage it a reboot will clear it up. Yeah you'd have to toggle the drive writeable to install new software or update. But is there really any point to leaving the boot drive writeable when you're not updating or installing?
That'll explain the recent stories about Chinese factories replacing humans with robots because the humans are too expensive
As I posted in that story, the Chinese are replacing humans with robots to prevent some other country from doing to China what China did to us. The reason overseas labor is cheap is because their economies are undeveloped. Economics interprets this as an inefficiency (poor utilization of potential for productivity), and consequently sends lots of business there. That results in the economy there developing and labor costs going up. Foxconn realizes this, and sees the inevitable outcome is a more developed China where the prevailing wages are not cost-competitive with still-undeveloped nations like Thailand, Vietnam, and most of Africa. By shifting over to robots now, when the prevailing wages in China do go up, their production costs will not follow and business will stay in China.
If we had been smarter, back in the 1970s and 1980s when industrial robotics was just taking off, we would have embraced it. Yeah a lot of blue collar workers would have lost their jobs, but we could have retrained them for new jobs designing, operating, and maintaining the robots because the actual manufacturing would have stayed in the country. Now it's too late. The manufacturing has been shipped entirely overseas so it's going to be incredibly difficult for a factory to fund and market a new robotic assembly line here. If you already have a labor-powered assembly line, you can fund a gradual transition to robotics using your current business contracts - like Foxconn is doing.
People are so quick to point out the shortsightedness of U.S. businesses sending manufacturing overseas. Yet those same people don't seem to recognize that by automating, Foxconn is trying to avoid the same thing happening to them, even if it's more expensive for them in the short term. These people are clinging to some fantasy where manufacturing will be based on human muscle and sweat in perpetuity. The long-term inevitability is that for rote and repetitive labor, manufacturing with robots is going to be or already is cheaper than human workers. As robotics and computer AI become more sophisticated, the number of tasks which qualify as rote and repetitive increases. Either accept that and plan business and industry around it, or reject it and complain when all your manufacturing jobs get shipped elsewhere.
It belongs to the public. A single entity should not get exclusive access to the spectrum in perpetuity. They should have to pay an annual lease on it to continue using it.
This also prevents companies from buying up spectrum to stifle competition. If they lease large amounts of spectrum which they then don't use, the bid price on the remainder will go up. The government can then use that bid price to raise the lease price for all spectrum in subsequent years, making it too expensive for companies to continue sitting on that spectrum. It's the same concept behind property taxes in real estate - by raising the price to own property in a highly desirable area, you force the owners to do something useful with the property rather than sitting on it as a speculative or anti-competitive move.
If you read the previous slashdot topic on this subject, there were at least two up-rated posts pointing out that the planet wasn't/wouldn't be diamond. Knowing what I do of chemistry, astrophysics, and materials science, I'm actually inclined to agree with them that it isn't diamond. Given the comments were rated up, there would appear to be a sizable number of us.
Apparently that makes us "diamond planet deniers" ignorable to them and their belief that they are right about this diamond planet. That's not science. And ironically this example ends up confirming the accusation of the AGW deniers. The AGW deniers claim data is being manipulated to make the science appear to support a politically motivated agenda. In this case the "diamond planet discoverers" are scientists who manipulated data ("100% positive feedback") to make it appear to support their politically motivated argument (that the diamond planet discovery had no critics, while climate science does).
Social Security began running at a deficit (benefits payouts exceeds SS tax revenue) last year. Unless your plan is to cut benefits payments to exactly match the drop in SS tax revenue, its shortfall most certainly makes it part of the overall Federal budget we need to be worried about.
But instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing the problem, people get into arguments of what else we should cut. Seemingly anything except Medicare/Medicaid. If we're not allowed to alter the program that's causing the problem, then our budget is already screwed before we've begun. I've been posting this same thing here for nearly 3 years now, ever since Obama's health care plan was up for debate and I took the time to actually read the CBO reports. The people we hired to find the problems with the budget have been telling us the answer for over 10 years now. If we're just going to ignore them and argue based on which programs we personally like/dislike, why even task them with that job in the first place?
The problem with these statistics is that they are unreliable for long term prospection; i.e. one big incident for nuclear or hydro (dam collapse) near populated areas would skew the result for all times.
We've had two big incidents with nuclear. One was pretty much the worst-case scenario and is estimated to have caused about 50 direct fatalities and 4000 long-term (cancer) fatalities (World Health Organization estimate). The other has caused zero fatalities (independent of the initial quake damage). The "big incident" risk from nuclear simply isn't as bad as the doomsayers say it is, especially when amortized over the amount of power produced.
And I should point out that the opposite effect (death by a thousand papercuts) is also present, and insulates distributed power generation like wind and solar from media scrutiny befitting the actual danger associated with them. Did you know that while Fukushima has thus far caused zero radiation-related deaths, we've already had two wind-related fatalities? A teen in Ohio climbed a wind turbine at his school which was inadequately secured, and fell to his death. And a maintenance worker in Iowa fell to his death while working inside a wind turbine.
The price for concentrating your power source like with nuclear is that when an incident happens, it can cause a lot more damage. The price for distributing your power source is that there's a lot more area and equipment which needs to be secured and maintained, and consequently a much higher chance for things to go (fatally) wrong.
Just to add something besides the i++ error, Microsoft lost a lot of face with businesses because of how long it took them to push Vista out. Prior major corporate releases of Windows were:
Aug 1995 - Windows 95
Jun 1998 - Windows 98
Feb 2000 - Windows 2000
Oct 2001 - Windows XP
Nov 2006- Windows Vista
You can see how they were keeping a schedule of 2-3 years between versions before Vista. At the time XP came out, Microsoft was trying to transition its business customers over to a subscription model, rather than a purchase model for its OS. Consequently, a lot of businesses signed up for a 3 year support contract with Microsoft with the understanding that said contract would cover upgrades to the next versions of Office, Exchange, and Windows. When the end of these contracts arrived in 2005 and Vista was nowhere in sight, a lot of businesses felt they'd been ripped off by Microsoft. They felt Microsoft had collected the money for Vista up-front via the support contracts, then simply delayed the release of Vista so that it would no longer be covered by their contract, forcing them to either pay for Vista (again, in their minds), or sign up for another support contract.
So while it's funny to mock Microsoft's regular releases of new Windows versions, a lot of businesses are counting on those releases to be regular.
Given the roommate's behavior, it's likely that should OP do as you suggest, his roommate will simply deny downloading anything. And I believe the wording on most ISP contracts makes the account owner liable for all activity on the account (with a possible exception for being hacked).
Fossil fuels get heavily subsidized. According to this, (which I have not independently verified or checked sources on) solar would be cheaper if that was turned around.
Alas, I wish that were true, but it isn't. The subsidies for fossil fuels appears huge because the vast majority of energy generated comes from fossil fuels. Once you normalize by the amount of energy generated (p6, table ES5), you find that the subsidy for fossil fuels is about $1.10 per MWh, while the subsidy for solar is around $24.34 per MWh. You could completely eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and it would have almost no impact on solar's cost-competitiveness.
At the very least "less optimal economy" seems like disingenuous or stupid way to judge the cost/benefit to me. The costs of global warming, asthma, coal-related deaths, and smog would massively tilt the scale in favor of green.
Nobody seems immune from this. When pro-nuclear people point out the cost of renewable technologies in terms of deaths (wind kills approx 4x more people per kWh than nuclear, solar is around 10x more once you factor in rooftop installation, and the worst power-related accident in history by far was a hydroelectric dam failure) or materials (wind and solar require approx 3-4x more construction materials per TWh than nuclear), renewable advocates likewise pretend these problems can simply be ignored.
Germany and a few other EU countries have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others). But if you calculate the area of the exclusion zones, you find that it's much larger than the evacuation zone of an equivalent-power nuclear plant during an emergency, only these are permanent while the wind turbine is operational. Oddly, most renewable advocates are surprised when they hear this. They shouldn't be. If you advocate a technology, you should learn everything you can about it - benefits and drawbacks.
There is (probably not surprisingly) a widespread tendency for people to see primarily the benefits of the technology they favor, while ignoring or downplaying the drawbacks. In my experience, this is true of advocates of for fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear - none are immune. (I am pro-nuclear, and about a third of my posts are correcting other pro-nuclear people who are under-emphasizing the risks of nuclear.)
The problem I've seen from games and emulators is that if your CPU has the horsepower, they will max it even if they don't need it. Why does a 3D game need to render at 160 FPS when my hardware is only capable of displaying 60 FPS? It doesn't, but it's hard-coded to render as many FPS as possible so it does.
The easy fix I've found is to throttle your CPU. For older versions of Windows and Core processors, you could use a utility like RMClock to limit its max GHz. For i3/i5/i7 processors and Windows 7, you can lower the max processor performance under control panel -> power options -> change plan settings -> change advanced power settings -> processor power management -> maximum processor state. My laptop used to run 3D games at 2.4 GHz at a sweltering 88 C and fan spinning like a turbine. I limited it to 1.78 GHz (75%), which dropped the temp to 70 C and the fan noise is bearable without headphones. The drop in framerate is mostly imperceptible.
I don't know what options OS X has for throttling CPU speed, but that's what you should be looking for. Emulating really old games should easily be doable with the CPU throttled to its minimum.
If that were true, then Amazon is more than free to take their case all the way up to the Supreme Court. But they've decided against that route, and I would imagine it's because their legal counsel knows more about the law than you do.
Bezos is on the record that he wants this settled by Federal legislation. You have to keep in mind that "nexus" (the exception to the Interstate Commerce Clause prohibiting interstate sales taxes) has never been fully defined. Even if Amazon takes this to the SCotUS and wins, thus establishing that affiliates do not confer nexus, it's not over. The states will just come up with a different approach to try to extend nexus to include Amazon (one state tried to claim nexus since Amazon used UPS to deliver its packages, and UPS has a physical presence in the state).
In other words, Amazon taking this to the Supreme Court will in no way end this. The states will keep trying over and over again, and every round is a victory for the states. They are burning taxpayer money, of which they can always get more by increasing taxes. But the money Amazon is bleeding to fight this comes out of their profit. Bezos has (rightly IMHO) come to the conclusion that this needs to be decided by Federal legislation to settle the issue once and for all.
So in that respect, this agreement is a win for Amazon. They got California to agree to wait a year on the taxes, while Amazon tries to get the Feds to weigh in on the matter. (I'm skeptical that they'll get something passed in a year, but Amazon would know better how their lobbying is going.)
Well, note that they stopped pushing their referendum.
It's questionable whether Amazon had any legal standing to push for the referendum in the first place. They are arguing that they should not have to collect sales taxes because do not have a physical presence in the state. That would seem by definition to equate to Amazon having no legal standing to champion a referendum in the state. True, Californians could take it up on their own, but that raises other issues of out-of-state entities spending on in-state politics.
Note also that the legislature in California is trying to repass the law requiring Amazon to charge sales taxes to CA residents as "a matter of urgency" (I think that's the term they use), which cannot be overturned with a referendum.
California's ballot initiative process modifies the State Constitution. While a mere referendum might not be able to undo a legislature-passed sales tax, a ballot initiative can do so easily.
Funny thing is, Amazon has physical stores in every state. After all, every kindle is a physical device. It links to and acts as a store front for Amazon.com. Therefore they have the same basic requirements to report sales and tax those sales that any other company with a physical store does...
You don't want to legitimize that line of reasoning. That's the kind of crazy thinking that would require all websites to comply with the laws of every country in the world just to legally be on the web, because anyone in those countries could access said websites, and by your reasoning that means the website has a physical presence in those countries.
While thats true in theory, in actual practice the onus is on the retailer to collect sales taxes. The corner store here couldn't get away with not collecting sales taxes and then saying that it was up to their customers to deal with it.
OP mischaracterized the tax as a sales tax. For items delivered across state lines, it is in fact a use tax, not a sales tax. And use taxes must be reported and paid by the individual residing within the state, not the retailer which sold the items. It is illegal for states to force out-of-state businesses to collect sales tax when they sell to customers in that state.
Frankly, I dont think there should be two sets of rules, one for brick and mortar stores and one for online.
There aren't two sets of rules. There is just one rule - if you sell to someone in a state where you have a physical presence, you charge sales tax.
If Amazon sells to someone in Washington (where Amazon is HQed), they charge sales tax.
If a B&M store in Washington sells to someone in Washington, they charge sales tax.
If Amazon sells to someone outside Washington (and where they don't have a warehouse), they don't charge sales tax.
If a B&M store in Washington sells to someone outside Washington, they don't charge sales tax.
In fact, forcing Amazon to charge sales tax in Calfiornia would be creating a second set of rules: B&M stores outside California don't charge sales tax when selling to Californians. Big internet retailers outside California do charge sales tax when selling to Californians. Two rules.
Especially when just about everything I order from Amazon ships from within the state. If I am in california and buy something from a company with a presence in California and my purchased items ship from California to me I should pay California sales taxes.
I am in California. Everything I order from Amazon which ships from Amazon partners in California has sales tax added on. Everything I order from Amazon which ships from outside California has no sales tax.
Amazon, the beefy company that eats physical retail stores for breakfast and shits out their skeletons, needs to do it's goddamn part in this country.
You openly admit sales taxes hurt physical retail stores relative to Amazon, but then somehow conclude that the solution is to expand sales taxes to hurt even more stores, all in the name of helping this country?
The Comodo and Diginotar break-ins and theft were traced to Iran. To me, when I read the pastebin post, I felt it was a cover up bit meant to mislead the general public.
Actually, to me it seems far more likely that the break-in originated elsewhere, then access was sold to Iran.
So in addition to an open wifi router, we now have another means by which an innocent user can unwittingly have copyrighted music and movie files downloaded via his/her IP address.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for periods of technological regression, your statement holds true for any moment in history. We're not concerned about the state of technological progress here, we're concerned about the rate of technological progress. The argument for patent reform is that without these sorts of patent fights draining tech companies of money and stifling innovation, the world's technology would be even more amazing and better than it is right now.
Copyright law allows up to $150,000 per violation to discourage commercial copyright infringement. That's when someone makes a bootleg CD and sells a tens of thousands of copies for few bucks each. What happens in this case is that the bootlegger is liable for (say) 15 tracks x $150,000 each. But in the process, this indemnifies all his customers. The CDs they bought aren't real, they're contraband. But because the ringleader behind the whole thing was caught and punished, and restitution made to the IP owners, they get to keep their CDs and are not liable to be sued for owning contraband.
What happens in filesharing is quite different. Say you share a song with 10,000 people. For a judgement approaching the $150,000 per song max to make sense, punishing you with that fine has to indemnify all those people you shared with. Otherwise you can fine Tenenbaum $22,500 for making 10,000 copies of a song, but you can also fine each of the 10,000 people he shared with $22,500 each for making the same song available to each other. Thus netting the record company a potential $225 million for 10,000 copies whereas in the bootleg CD case they could only net $150,000 for the 10,000 copies.
This country really needs to pass a copyright law which distinguishes between these two cases. The current copyright statutes make sense for commercial copyright infringement when there's a single perpetrator behind it all. A new copyright statute needs to be made to cover cases of peer-to-peer filesharing, which recognizes that 10,000 people sharing a sing with each other means each person on average only made 1 copy. Punishment needs to reflect that average, meaning something on the order of $100 should be adequate. Either that or limit copyright holders to suing one and only one filesharer per song, ever. Right now, we're allowing record companies to sue 10,000 people on the basis of making 100 million copies, even though only 10,000 copies were ever made.
Long-term, I think this is the future. Processing and storage will move to your phone (well, critical storage and backups might go onto the cloud, or a home server). Your "tablet" will become a display which interfaces wirelessly with your phone. Your "laptop" will become a keyboard which interfaces wireless with your phone, which is interfacing wireless with your "tablet".
If you know you're going to be doing a lot of typing and mousing, you'll bring the display, keyboard, and mouse along with your phone.
If you know you're mostly just going to be viewing data, you'll just bring the display along with your phone.
If you know you're not going to really need the computer, you'll just bring along your phone. Your data is still accessible should you happen to need it.
It's a little ironic that developing countries will experience this before modernized countries, but a similar thing happened with wireless telecom. Modernized countries already had entrenched wired telecom networks, so wireless was just an option. Developing countries had no networks, and wireless networks were a lot cheaper to build, so they built (relatively) extensive wireless telecom networks.
Obligatory XKCD comic.
Just a business and occupation tax which varies by industry. In most cases it's about 1% of revenue, which is pretty business-friendly.
Oregon has a two-tiered corporate income tax, which tops out at 7.9% of profit over $250k. Web-based services usually have low expenses, so there's not much difference between revenue and profit, making Washington the clear winner.
That's what I was thinking. A SATA/USB3 adapter I bought has a jumper to make the drive read-only. That got me thinking - why can't we have a hardware toggle switch to make the boot drive read-only? You can't root it if you can't modify any of the bootable system files, or if you do manage it a reboot will clear it up. Yeah you'd have to toggle the drive writeable to install new software or update. But is there really any point to leaving the boot drive writeable when you're not updating or installing?
As I posted in that story, the Chinese are replacing humans with robots to prevent some other country from doing to China what China did to us. The reason overseas labor is cheap is because their economies are undeveloped. Economics interprets this as an inefficiency (poor utilization of potential for productivity), and consequently sends lots of business there. That results in the economy there developing and labor costs going up. Foxconn realizes this, and sees the inevitable outcome is a more developed China where the prevailing wages are not cost-competitive with still-undeveloped nations like Thailand, Vietnam, and most of Africa. By shifting over to robots now, when the prevailing wages in China do go up, their production costs will not follow and business will stay in China.
If we had been smarter, back in the 1970s and 1980s when industrial robotics was just taking off, we would have embraced it. Yeah a lot of blue collar workers would have lost their jobs, but we could have retrained them for new jobs designing, operating, and maintaining the robots because the actual manufacturing would have stayed in the country. Now it's too late. The manufacturing has been shipped entirely overseas so it's going to be incredibly difficult for a factory to fund and market a new robotic assembly line here. If you already have a labor-powered assembly line, you can fund a gradual transition to robotics using your current business contracts - like Foxconn is doing.
People are so quick to point out the shortsightedness of U.S. businesses sending manufacturing overseas. Yet those same people don't seem to recognize that by automating, Foxconn is trying to avoid the same thing happening to them, even if it's more expensive for them in the short term. These people are clinging to some fantasy where manufacturing will be based on human muscle and sweat in perpetuity. The long-term inevitability is that for rote and repetitive labor, manufacturing with robots is going to be or already is cheaper than human workers. As robotics and computer AI become more sophisticated, the number of tasks which qualify as rote and repetitive increases. Either accept that and plan business and industry around it, or reject it and complain when all your manufacturing jobs get shipped elsewhere.
It belongs to the public. A single entity should not get exclusive access to the spectrum in perpetuity. They should have to pay an annual lease on it to continue using it.
This also prevents companies from buying up spectrum to stifle competition. If they lease large amounts of spectrum which they then don't use, the bid price on the remainder will go up. The government can then use that bid price to raise the lease price for all spectrum in subsequent years, making it too expensive for companies to continue sitting on that spectrum. It's the same concept behind property taxes in real estate - by raising the price to own property in a highly desirable area, you force the owners to do something useful with the property rather than sitting on it as a speculative or anti-competitive move.
If you read the previous slashdot topic on this subject, there were at least two up-rated posts pointing out that the planet wasn't/wouldn't be diamond. Knowing what I do of chemistry, astrophysics, and materials science, I'm actually inclined to agree with them that it isn't diamond. Given the comments were rated up, there would appear to be a sizable number of us.
Apparently that makes us "diamond planet deniers" ignorable to them and their belief that they are right about this diamond planet. That's not science. And ironically this example ends up confirming the accusation of the AGW deniers. The AGW deniers claim data is being manipulated to make the science appear to support a politically motivated agenda. In this case the "diamond planet discoverers" are scientists who manipulated data ("100% positive feedback") to make it appear to support their politically motivated argument (that the diamond planet discovery had no critics, while climate science does).
Social Security began running at a deficit (benefits payouts exceeds SS tax revenue) last year. Unless your plan is to cut benefits payments to exactly match the drop in SS tax revenue, its shortfall most certainly makes it part of the overall Federal budget we need to be worried about.
Every couple years the Congressional Budget Office puts out a new report on what programs are causing our budget problems. And in every report for more than a decade, the culprit has always been Medicare/Medicaid. Its growth far outstrips any other program, increases in Medicare payroll tax revenue falls far short of offsetting its costs, and under current rules it will all by itself exceed the historical average of total federal tax revenue (18% of GDP) in about 60 years.
But instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing the problem, people get into arguments of what else we should cut. Seemingly anything except Medicare/Medicaid. If we're not allowed to alter the program that's causing the problem, then our budget is already screwed before we've begun. I've been posting this same thing here for nearly 3 years now, ever since Obama's health care plan was up for debate and I took the time to actually read the CBO reports. The people we hired to find the problems with the budget have been telling us the answer for over 10 years now. If we're just going to ignore them and argue based on which programs we personally like/dislike, why even task them with that job in the first place?
We've had two big incidents with nuclear. One was pretty much the worst-case scenario and is estimated to have caused about 50 direct fatalities and 4000 long-term (cancer) fatalities (World Health Organization estimate). The other has caused zero fatalities (independent of the initial quake damage). The "big incident" risk from nuclear simply isn't as bad as the doomsayers say it is, especially when amortized over the amount of power produced.
And I should point out that the opposite effect (death by a thousand papercuts) is also present, and insulates distributed power generation like wind and solar from media scrutiny befitting the actual danger associated with them. Did you know that while Fukushima has thus far caused zero radiation-related deaths, we've already had two wind-related fatalities? A teen in Ohio climbed a wind turbine at his school which was inadequately secured, and fell to his death. And a maintenance worker in Iowa fell to his death while working inside a wind turbine.
The price for concentrating your power source like with nuclear is that when an incident happens, it can cause a lot more damage. The price for distributing your power source is that there's a lot more area and equipment which needs to be secured and maintained, and consequently a much higher chance for things to go (fatally) wrong.
Just to add something besides the i++ error, Microsoft lost a lot of face with businesses because of how long it took them to push Vista out. Prior major corporate releases of Windows were:
Aug 1995 - Windows 95
Jun 1998 - Windows 98
Feb 2000 - Windows 2000
Oct 2001 - Windows XP
Nov 2006- Windows Vista
You can see how they were keeping a schedule of 2-3 years between versions before Vista. At the time XP came out, Microsoft was trying to transition its business customers over to a subscription model, rather than a purchase model for its OS. Consequently, a lot of businesses signed up for a 3 year support contract with Microsoft with the understanding that said contract would cover upgrades to the next versions of Office, Exchange, and Windows. When the end of these contracts arrived in 2005 and Vista was nowhere in sight, a lot of businesses felt they'd been ripped off by Microsoft. They felt Microsoft had collected the money for Vista up-front via the support contracts, then simply delayed the release of Vista so that it would no longer be covered by their contract, forcing them to either pay for Vista (again, in their minds), or sign up for another support contract.
So while it's funny to mock Microsoft's regular releases of new Windows versions, a lot of businesses are counting on those releases to be regular.
Given the roommate's behavior, it's likely that should OP do as you suggest, his roommate will simply deny downloading anything. And I believe the wording on most ISP contracts makes the account owner liable for all activity on the account (with a possible exception for being hacked).
Alas, I wish that were true, but it isn't. The subsidies for fossil fuels appears huge because the vast majority of energy generated comes from fossil fuels. Once you normalize by the amount of energy generated (p6, table ES5), you find that the subsidy for fossil fuels is about $1.10 per MWh, while the subsidy for solar is around $24.34 per MWh. You could completely eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and it would have almost no impact on solar's cost-competitiveness.
Nobody seems immune from this. When pro-nuclear people point out the cost of renewable technologies in terms of deaths (wind kills approx 4x more people per kWh than nuclear, solar is around 10x more once you factor in rooftop installation, and the worst power-related accident in history by far was a hydroelectric dam failure) or materials (wind and solar require approx 3-4x more construction materials per TWh than nuclear), renewable advocates likewise pretend these problems can simply be ignored.
Germany and a few other EU countries have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others). But if you calculate the area of the exclusion zones, you find that it's much larger than the evacuation zone of an equivalent-power nuclear plant during an emergency, only these are permanent while the wind turbine is operational. Oddly, most renewable advocates are surprised when they hear this. They shouldn't be. If you advocate a technology, you should learn everything you can about it - benefits and drawbacks.
There is (probably not surprisingly) a widespread tendency for people to see primarily the benefits of the technology they favor, while ignoring or downplaying the drawbacks. In my experience, this is true of advocates of for fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear - none are immune. (I am pro-nuclear, and about a third of my posts are correcting other pro-nuclear people who are under-emphasizing the risks of nuclear.)
For those of you who think Samsung copied Apple merely because the Tab and iPad look similar, look again.
The problem I've seen from games and emulators is that if your CPU has the horsepower, they will max it even if they don't need it. Why does a 3D game need to render at 160 FPS when my hardware is only capable of displaying 60 FPS? It doesn't, but it's hard-coded to render as many FPS as possible so it does.
The easy fix I've found is to throttle your CPU. For older versions of Windows and Core processors, you could use a utility like RMClock to limit its max GHz. For i3/i5/i7 processors and Windows 7, you can lower the max processor performance under control panel -> power options -> change plan settings -> change advanced power settings -> processor power management -> maximum processor state. My laptop used to run 3D games at 2.4 GHz at a sweltering 88 C and fan spinning like a turbine. I limited it to 1.78 GHz (75%), which dropped the temp to 70 C and the fan noise is bearable without headphones. The drop in framerate is mostly imperceptible.
I don't know what options OS X has for throttling CPU speed, but that's what you should be looking for. Emulating really old games should easily be doable with the CPU throttled to its minimum.
Bezos is on the record that he wants this settled by Federal legislation. You have to keep in mind that "nexus" (the exception to the Interstate Commerce Clause prohibiting interstate sales taxes) has never been fully defined. Even if Amazon takes this to the SCotUS and wins, thus establishing that affiliates do not confer nexus, it's not over. The states will just come up with a different approach to try to extend nexus to include Amazon (one state tried to claim nexus since Amazon used UPS to deliver its packages, and UPS has a physical presence in the state).
In other words, Amazon taking this to the Supreme Court will in no way end this. The states will keep trying over and over again, and every round is a victory for the states. They are burning taxpayer money, of which they can always get more by increasing taxes. But the money Amazon is bleeding to fight this comes out of their profit. Bezos has (rightly IMHO) come to the conclusion that this needs to be decided by Federal legislation to settle the issue once and for all.
So in that respect, this agreement is a win for Amazon. They got California to agree to wait a year on the taxes, while Amazon tries to get the Feds to weigh in on the matter. (I'm skeptical that they'll get something passed in a year, but Amazon would know better how their lobbying is going.)
It's questionable whether Amazon had any legal standing to push for the referendum in the first place. They are arguing that they should not have to collect sales taxes because do not have a physical presence in the state. That would seem by definition to equate to Amazon having no legal standing to champion a referendum in the state. True, Californians could take it up on their own, but that raises other issues of out-of-state entities spending on in-state politics.
California's ballot initiative process modifies the State Constitution. While a mere referendum might not be able to undo a legislature-passed sales tax, a ballot initiative can do so easily.
You don't want to legitimize that line of reasoning. That's the kind of crazy thinking that would require all websites to comply with the laws of every country in the world just to legally be on the web, because anyone in those countries could access said websites, and by your reasoning that means the website has a physical presence in those countries.
OP mischaracterized the tax as a sales tax. For items delivered across state lines, it is in fact a use tax, not a sales tax. And use taxes must be reported and paid by the individual residing within the state, not the retailer which sold the items. It is illegal for states to force out-of-state businesses to collect sales tax when they sell to customers in that state.
There aren't two sets of rules. There is just one rule - if you sell to someone in a state where you have a physical presence, you charge sales tax.
If Amazon sells to someone in Washington (where Amazon is HQed), they charge sales tax.
If a B&M store in Washington sells to someone in Washington, they charge sales tax.
If Amazon sells to someone outside Washington (and where they don't have a warehouse), they don't charge sales tax.
If a B&M store in Washington sells to someone outside Washington, they don't charge sales tax.
In fact, forcing Amazon to charge sales tax in Calfiornia would be creating a second set of rules: B&M stores outside California don't charge sales tax when selling to Californians. Big internet retailers outside California do charge sales tax when selling to Californians. Two rules.
I am in California. Everything I order from Amazon which ships from Amazon partners in California has sales tax added on. Everything I order from Amazon which ships from outside California has no sales tax.
You openly admit sales taxes hurt physical retail stores relative to Amazon, but then somehow conclude that the solution is to expand sales taxes to hurt even more stores, all in the name of helping this country?
FTFY
Actually, to me it seems far more likely that the break-in originated elsewhere, then access was sold to Iran.
So in addition to an open wifi router, we now have another means by which an innocent user can unwittingly have copyrighted music and movie files downloaded via his/her IP address.