4. The effect of the use upon the potential market. By making a backup of your software, you are potentially depriving the copyright owner of a second sale in the event your original media are destroyed or otherwise rendered unreadable.
But according to the EULA you're not buying the software, you're buying a license to use the software. Even if your original media is destroyed or unusable, your license is still valid. Either the software manufacturer owes you a free copy of the software (minus media and shipping costs), or you can use your backup. No effect on the market.
The whole thing is predicated on the notion that you're cool if you have wads of money to throw around. Buying a large gas-guzzling vehicle tells people "I'm so rich I can buy an overpriced gas-guzzler." Buying a hybrid or electric vehicle doesn't tell people "I'm environmentally conscious," it tells them "I'm so poor/cheap I have to scrimp on gas." So unless you can break the connection in people's mind between "rich" and "cool" I don't think this will ever change.
It can however be dampened. You can impose taxes which make it so expensive that only the truly rich can afford them, not the "lease more than I can afford so I can appear rich" crowd. You can institute a shame campaign much like what's been done with smoking.
I'd also disagree that Heather Has Two Mommies is inappropriate for elementary school kids. We have books picturing heterosexual couples, why not homosexual ones?
Heterosexual couples are necessary for the propogation of the species. Homosexual couples are not.
In other words, parents eventually having to teach their kids about heterosexuality is a requirement. Parents teaching their kids about homosexuality is optional. Not saying that justifies the latter being banned. But an argument based on equality of access to information about the two just doesn't work.
Basically, airbags started to make the news and Congress decided automakers were taking too long to implement them. So they passed a law stipulating x% of new cars sold had to have an automatic restraint system, with x increasing each year until it hit 100%. For a few years in the mid to late 80s, automakers that couldn't get airbags implemented/priced low enough used the automatic seatbelt thingamajig to satisfy the law. It was never "in style" - everyone hated them.
That's why the lap belt wasn't attached. There's no way to automatically move the lap belt out of the way while the occupant is getting into the seat.
Contrary to Universal's claim in that case that piracy due to VCRs would destroy the industry, videotape (and now DVD) sales and rentals have grown to where the movie companies make as much money off them as they do from theater releases.
Ya know. I'm sick and tired of the "leaving information out" argument against Michael Moore. When is the last time *you* made an argument and you brought mentioned every last possible fact that could harm your argument? When a person makes anargument, it *is not their responsibility to make the counter argument*. It is the responsibility of the opposing party in the argument,
You could apply this reasoning to George Bush. He only cited evidence supporting the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that there were ties between Iraq and 9/11 terrorists. He left out the little bits about those claims being from dubious sources and the timelines not quite matching up. So by your reasoning, Bush did no wrong?
People, especially documentary filmmakers (which Moore does not claim to be, but which ironically gets left out in most press reports), should take a page from science. In science, when you do a study and it seems to support one hypothesis, one of the things you do is list all the possible alternative hypotheses you can think of.
Laying out both sides of the argument as you see it is what people do when they're trying to get at the truth.
Laying out just your side of the argument is what you do when you're trying to trick people into believing you (and I'm referring to both Bush and Moore when I say that). There's a name for people who do that - Con Men.
NOBODY and I mean NOBODY is telling you that you have to upgrade your whole collection. Sure you might have to buy a HD-DVD player to buy the latest releases, but that won't cost much (cheap DVD players are less that $60 now) and there are improvements in the standard.
I think what upsets people is that someone upgrading from a VHS to a DVD to an HD-DVD copy of a movie pays just as much as someone who's buying the HD-DVD version as his first copy. That is, you aren't just paying for the improvement in the standard. You're paying for the improvements + any intellectual rights to view the movie. If you own the VHS and DVD versions as well, you've paid for those intellectual rights multiple times.
This flies in the face of the MPAA/RIAA's argument that filesharing is bad because when you buy a DVD/CD, you are purchasing intellectual rights to view/listen. If it's wrong for me to view/listen to the DVD/CD without buying a license, it's wrong for them to sell the same license to me multiple times in different formats. The software industry figured out this contradiction long ago and offers discounts for upgrade versions.
The backup systems probably deliberately backs up the text messages. If the system went down and they had to restore, they would want the text messages restored as well.
The problem (if you can call it that) is they decided not to program in a timeout for the text message database, so that after the backup is X days or weeks old, the messages are deleted. Given that you generally don't want to be deleting stuff from backups, it's an understandable decision.
The question is who has the problem and what's the best/easiest solution. The wiki admins don't care - their software is doing what it's supposed to be doing. Google is the one that has the problem with it because it degrades their search service. Do they solve it by convincing thousands (millions?) of sandbox administrators to all change their system? Or do they solve it by changing their algorithm?
The problem with a system of organisation is that you to remember the system in addition to how things fit into the system. In other words, if you forget the system, you're screwed.
My "messy system" just involves putting stuff near where I need it, temporally stacked. Photo scanning stuff (compressed air, brush, pending slides, etc) goes next to the scanner. Computer stuff goes next to the computer. Stuff I need while reading books goes next to the books. etc. I imagine most "messy" people are like that too - favoring efficiency over cleanliness (less time spent getting and returning stuff from/to its storage location since it's already right where you need it). It's pretty hard to "forget" this "system" unless you forget what you want to do.
Why do you think we have so many different cellular technologies here in the states...most of them aren't compatible with each other?
We just need to standardize and streamline (especially the FCC procedures) our wireless so we can get 300Mbps.
We have so many different celluar technologies in the U.S. because the government took a hands-off approach so the free market could decide which technology was best. It worked too. While the rest of the world settled by committee on time-division multiplexing, the major carriers in the U.S. drifted towards code-division multiplexing. The rest of the world is now switching over to code-division mutliplexing because it's better, even with the burden of the patents held by Qualcomm.
Having all the cooks work together on one standard is certainly faster, but it's only better if you can correctly acertain from the outset which standard would be the best long-term. If you guess wrong, you end up with a bunch of R&D into a dead-end technology (e.g. the huge Japanese investment into analog HDTV). Figuring out the best standard is often a very difficult problem whose importance is as great as the R&D in the technology itself; and the free market is really great at solving that problem (provided it isn't manipulated by lobbyists and monopolists).
If consumers want it, they should vote with their feet (wallet), and the free market will work its magic. I have little faith in government regulation as a wise hand. [...] Why should the government be regulating things other than "right to life" services?
The free market is not a panacea. When it works, it works really well. But there are several scenarios where it fails. The prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of the commons is one (where decisions which benefit each individual the most results in the worst possible outcome for everyone). Monopolistic practices are another (where decisions benefit the monopolist at everyone else's expense). Industry collusion, whether overt or understood, is a subset of the monopolist scenario (not that I'm saying it's happening here, but it certainly could happen). It's the government's job to step in on these cases with legislation which allows the free market to work properly.
A properly functioning free market needs well-informed consumers. Deception is an inefficiency which hinders capitalism. Sometimes the market eliminates it by itself, sometimes it needs the help of a regulating agency to eliminate it. It's like an optimizing algorithm that gets fooled and trapped by certain holes or minima in the solution space - by sellers deceiving purchasers by hiding fees, using confusing or hard to read contract terms, locking them in (i.e. putting up a barrier against choice), etc. It's the government's job to set up barriers around those false solutions so the algorithm (capitalism) can go about finding real solutions.
Try shutting down a big app that takes a while to unload (Mozilla works). While it's shutting down, try to start another instance of the same app. Windows will show the hourglass pointer as if it were starting another instance of the app, but it won't start. You have to wait for the first instance to finish unloading before XP will let you open it up again. If you try the same thing but opening up a different app, it works like you'd expect - the second app starts while the first one is exiting.
It's as if rather than truly unloading the app from memory, Windows is just decrementing a flag which says the app is no longer in memory. When it decrements it to 0, it probably runs some routine which restores the used memory to the state it'd be in if you'd just started the app. But until it finishes this, it can't increment the flag to 1 (restart the app). Whereas if it were truly reloading the app at a different memory address, it could start loading it immediately.
Given some of the behavior I've seen from users, I can actually understand making the GUI behave this way. I've seen many users who still don't get or refuse to use the concept of having multiple documents open at once. If they need to open a different Word file, they will exit Word (to close the file they're working on), then double-click on the new file they want to open. Restarting an app behind the scenes in this situation makes sense in a predictive branching sort of way.
C'mon, think objectively for a moment. It's obvious that survey is BS. If you only search under the lamp post, you're only going to find things that are under the lamp post. The survey only looks for misconceptions that support the war, so obviously it'll find only misconceptions that support the war.
In other words, that survey is only looking for false positives, so of course it will only find false positives. The number of false positives says absolutely nothing about the relative number of false results out there. A well-crafted survey will look for true positives (statements supporting the war which are true), false positives (statements supporting the war which are false), true negatives (statements opposing the war which are true), and false negatives (statements opposing the war which are false). Only then can you compare which side tends to have more misconceptions. You take the ratio of false positives to all positives, and compare it to the ratio of false negatives to all negatives. The one with the higher rate (assuming your statements were somewhat balanced in their believability and obscurity) would then be the one with more misconceptions.
Anyone pretending to have drawn some sort of authoritative conclusion based on sampling only one of these four possibilities would've been laughed out of any intro statistics course.
Looking at the cost of just the lander for a Mars mission is like excluding the cost of travel from a vacation budget. The entire Mars Express mission (of which Beagle 2 was a part) cost about 300 million Euros. In contrast, Mars Pathfinder was only $265 million, with about $150 million spent on the lander and only $25 million on the rover.
The primary reason Beagle 2 failed was because it was the ESA's first try at Mars. They will learn from it, and it will help them succeed in the future. The orbiter did just fine, which given the past track record of spacecraft sent to Mars is quite an accomplishment.
It was by a group of Canadian organic farmers. They claimed that Monsanto's GM seeds were contaminating their crops, causing them to lose their ability to label that crop as organic. Their reasoning was that if Monsanto has to be paid if their GM seeds spread and unintentionally benefit a farmer, then Monsanto should pay if their GM seeds spread and unintentionally harm a farmer. I dunno what happened in that case though as I never saw a followup in the news.
The whole video was first broadcast on ABC Evening News. My entire family stopped eating dinner for the 10 or so minutes the video ran.
It's actually the websites that are showing an edited version of the video - the Iraqi who's initially shot up was transferring RPGs from the pickup trick to a weapons cache in the field. The video floating around the web starts after he's dropped the RPGs and is walking back, making it look like the pilot is shooting up guys just hanging around a field. The Apache was there watching because they'd gotten intel that the weapons transfer was going to happen there. The version of the video that was aired on TV starts with the two trucks arriving, and shows all of this, along with the pilots describing it to their CO, asking for, and receiving permission to open fire.
Probably the best/most rugged palmtop computer for close to a decade. It's basically a DOS machine with 2-4 MB of memory, a ramdisk, option for a flash PCMCIA card, and a bunch of embedded apps like Lotus 1-2-3. Mine still runs and I'd probably prefer it to my Palm if there were a way to replace the display with something more modern and backlit.
In fact, if demand for cheap electronics was higher, competition would eventually drive the prices even lower.
Increased demand raises prices, not lowers it. Economics 101.
Cheap electronics are cheap because the technology has been around so long it's been optimized to the moon and back. There isn't much more optimization you can squeeze out of it to lower the cost more than they already are. So increased competition in the market for this stuff wouldn't lower the price much.
The original poster is right. Low demand coupled with highly optimized manufacturing (thanks to competition in the past) keeps the price of old hardware low. Old inventory, which companies try to get rid of below manufacturing cost to recover at least some of their initial investment, drives the price even lower. If demand were to shift towards older hardware, its price would go up, not down.
Claiming that an RTG released more P-238 than all previous nuclear explosions, when the manufacturing process for a nuclear bomb involves getting rid of as much P-238 as possible before it's ever exploded. (P-239 is fissible, P-238 is not and a lot of work goes into getting rid of it to produce a viable bomb.) The layman would read that as "the RTG released more plutonium than all previous nuclear explosions," which is probably the point - to mislead the reader into thinking the danger from an RTG is like the danger from a nuclear bomb.
Average solar power falling on the U.S. (night and day) is about 240 Watts per m^2. Assume there are no clouds. Assume a solar panel is 50% efficient (current best technology is just over 20% efficient). U.S. power consumption rate is about 10^13 Watts. To satisfy that demand with solar power would require 10^13/120 = 8.33x10^11 m^2, or 833,333 square km. U.S. land area is 9,159,000 square km. So to satisfy the U.S.'s power demands with solar, you'd have to pave 9% of its entire land area with solar panels. Yes improved energy efficieny would help, but only to a point since 100% efficiency does not mean zero energy needed.
If you insist on using solar power, a better solution would be harnessing wave energy and sub-oceanic thermal differentials. Those oceans out there are already soaking up 70% of the solar energy that hits the earth. Why pave the land with solare panels?
The crazy thing is that in the USA, a company can Trademark a name like "parmesan", even when parmesan has meant something very specific in the rest of the world for hundreds of years.
Kinda like how in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, a company has trademarked a name like "windows", even when window has meant something very specific in the rest of the English-speaking world for hundreds of years?
That means almost 1% less spent on military in UK - that is a lot of money.
Of course it's a lot of money. But we're not talking about sums of money, we're talking about % of GNP; and 1% just isn't that big (it's not small either, but it's nowhere near the magnitude of disparity in gross spending).
The average spending is around 3% and the 43:rd place puts US on the upper half of the list.
That's interpreting the statistics to make it fit your conclusions. Because the data doesn't directly support your conclusion that the U.S. is a big spender, you interpret the data in a way which groups the U.S. with the big spenders. Ergo guilt by association.
Take a standard deviation of those spending figures. The U.S. is well within one standard deviation of the average. That means the data supports the conclusion that the U.S. is pretty much average in terms of its military spending as % of GNP. Yes it's on the high side of average, but it's still closer to average than to the high spenders you're trying to group it with.
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That does nothing but alter the wording of EULAs when it detects the legalese. I seriously doubt any court would uphold them once that happens.
But according to the EULA you're not buying the software, you're buying a license to use the software. Even if your original media is destroyed or unusable, your license is still valid. Either the software manufacturer owes you a free copy of the software (minus media and shipping costs), or you can use your backup. No effect on the market.
It can however be dampened. You can impose taxes which make it so expensive that only the truly rich can afford them, not the "lease more than I can afford so I can appear rich" crowd. You can institute a shame campaign much like what's been done with smoking.
Heterosexual couples are necessary for the propogation of the species. Homosexual couples are not.
In other words, parents eventually having to teach their kids about heterosexuality is a requirement. Parents teaching their kids about homosexuality is optional. Not saying that justifies the latter being banned. But an argument based on equality of access to information about the two just doesn't work.
Basically, airbags started to make the news and Congress decided automakers were taking too long to implement them. So they passed a law stipulating x% of new cars sold had to have an automatic restraint system, with x increasing each year until it hit 100%. For a few years in the mid to late 80s, automakers that couldn't get airbags implemented/priced low enough used the automatic seatbelt thingamajig to satisfy the law. It was never "in style" - everyone hated them. That's why the lap belt wasn't attached. There's no way to automatically move the lap belt out of the way while the occupant is getting into the seat.
Contrary to Universal's claim in that case that piracy due to VCRs would destroy the industry, videotape (and now DVD) sales and rentals have grown to where the movie companies make as much money off them as they do from theater releases.
You could apply this reasoning to George Bush. He only cited evidence supporting the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that there were ties between Iraq and 9/11 terrorists. He left out the little bits about those claims being from dubious sources and the timelines not quite matching up. So by your reasoning, Bush did no wrong?
People, especially documentary filmmakers (which Moore does not claim to be, but which ironically gets left out in most press reports), should take a page from science. In science, when you do a study and it seems to support one hypothesis, one of the things you do is list all the possible alternative hypotheses you can think of.
Laying out both sides of the argument as you see it is what people do when they're trying to get at the truth.
Laying out just your side of the argument is what you do when you're trying to trick people into believing you (and I'm referring to both Bush and Moore when I say that). There's a name for people who do that - Con Men.
I think what upsets people is that someone upgrading from a VHS to a DVD to an HD-DVD copy of a movie pays just as much as someone who's buying the HD-DVD version as his first copy. That is, you aren't just paying for the improvement in the standard. You're paying for the improvements + any intellectual rights to view the movie. If you own the VHS and DVD versions as well, you've paid for those intellectual rights multiple times.
This flies in the face of the MPAA/RIAA's argument that filesharing is bad because when you buy a DVD/CD, you are purchasing intellectual rights to view/listen. If it's wrong for me to view/listen to the DVD/CD without buying a license, it's wrong for them to sell the same license to me multiple times in different formats. The software industry figured out this contradiction long ago and offers discounts for upgrade versions.
The problem (if you can call it that) is they decided not to program in a timeout for the text message database, so that after the backup is X days or weeks old, the messages are deleted. Given that you generally don't want to be deleting stuff from backups, it's an understandable decision.
The question is who has the problem and what's the best/easiest solution. The wiki admins don't care - their software is doing what it's supposed to be doing. Google is the one that has the problem with it because it degrades their search service. Do they solve it by convincing thousands (millions?) of sandbox administrators to all change their system? Or do they solve it by changing their algorithm?
My "messy system" just involves putting stuff near where I need it, temporally stacked. Photo scanning stuff (compressed air, brush, pending slides, etc) goes next to the scanner. Computer stuff goes next to the computer. Stuff I need while reading books goes next to the books. etc. I imagine most "messy" people are like that too - favoring efficiency over cleanliness (less time spent getting and returning stuff from/to its storage location since it's already right where you need it). It's pretty hard to "forget" this "system" unless you forget what you want to do.
We have so many different celluar technologies in the U.S. because the government took a hands-off approach so the free market could decide which technology was best. It worked too. While the rest of the world settled by committee on time-division multiplexing, the major carriers in the U.S. drifted towards code-division multiplexing. The rest of the world is now switching over to code-division mutliplexing because it's better, even with the burden of the patents held by Qualcomm.
Having all the cooks work together on one standard is certainly faster, but it's only better if you can correctly acertain from the outset which standard would be the best long-term. If you guess wrong, you end up with a bunch of R&D into a dead-end technology (e.g. the huge Japanese investment into analog HDTV). Figuring out the best standard is often a very difficult problem whose importance is as great as the R&D in the technology itself; and the free market is really great at solving that problem (provided it isn't manipulated by lobbyists and monopolists).
The free market is not a panacea. When it works, it works really well. But there are several scenarios where it fails. The prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of the commons is one (where decisions which benefit each individual the most results in the worst possible outcome for everyone). Monopolistic practices are another (where decisions benefit the monopolist at everyone else's expense). Industry collusion, whether overt or understood, is a subset of the monopolist scenario (not that I'm saying it's happening here, but it certainly could happen). It's the government's job to step in on these cases with legislation which allows the free market to work properly.
A properly functioning free market needs well-informed consumers. Deception is an inefficiency which hinders capitalism. Sometimes the market eliminates it by itself, sometimes it needs the help of a regulating agency to eliminate it. It's like an optimizing algorithm that gets fooled and trapped by certain holes or minima in the solution space - by sellers deceiving purchasers by hiding fees, using confusing or hard to read contract terms, locking them in (i.e. putting up a barrier against choice), etc. It's the government's job to set up barriers around those false solutions so the algorithm (capitalism) can go about finding real solutions.
It's as if rather than truly unloading the app from memory, Windows is just decrementing a flag which says the app is no longer in memory. When it decrements it to 0, it probably runs some routine which restores the used memory to the state it'd be in if you'd just started the app. But until it finishes this, it can't increment the flag to 1 (restart the app). Whereas if it were truly reloading the app at a different memory address, it could start loading it immediately.
Given some of the behavior I've seen from users, I can actually understand making the GUI behave this way. I've seen many users who still don't get or refuse to use the concept of having multiple documents open at once. If they need to open a different Word file, they will exit Word (to close the file they're working on), then double-click on the new file they want to open. Restarting an app behind the scenes in this situation makes sense in a predictive branching sort of way.
In other words, that survey is only looking for false positives, so of course it will only find false positives. The number of false positives says absolutely nothing about the relative number of false results out there. A well-crafted survey will look for true positives (statements supporting the war which are true), false positives (statements supporting the war which are false), true negatives (statements opposing the war which are true), and false negatives (statements opposing the war which are false). Only then can you compare which side tends to have more misconceptions. You take the ratio of false positives to all positives, and compare it to the ratio of false negatives to all negatives. The one with the higher rate (assuming your statements were somewhat balanced in their believability and obscurity) would then be the one with more misconceptions.
Anyone pretending to have drawn some sort of authoritative conclusion based on sampling only one of these four possibilities would've been laughed out of any intro statistics course.
The primary reason Beagle 2 failed was because it was the ESA's first try at Mars. They will learn from it, and it will help them succeed in the future. The orbiter did just fine, which given the past track record of spacecraft sent to Mars is quite an accomplishment.
It was by a group of Canadian organic farmers. They claimed that Monsanto's GM seeds were contaminating their crops, causing them to lose their ability to label that crop as organic. Their reasoning was that if Monsanto has to be paid if their GM seeds spread and unintentionally benefit a farmer, then Monsanto should pay if their GM seeds spread and unintentionally harm a farmer. I dunno what happened in that case though as I never saw a followup in the news.
A customer deals with many merchants but few or no customers. Of course the vast majority of fraud they experience will be by merchants.
It's actually the websites that are showing an edited version of the video - the Iraqi who's initially shot up was transferring RPGs from the pickup trick to a weapons cache in the field. The video floating around the web starts after he's dropped the RPGs and is walking back, making it look like the pilot is shooting up guys just hanging around a field. The Apache was there watching because they'd gotten intel that the weapons transfer was going to happen there. The version of the video that was aired on TV starts with the two trucks arriving, and shows all of this, along with the pilots describing it to their CO, asking for, and receiving permission to open fire.
HP 200LX technical details
Increased demand raises prices, not lowers it. Economics 101.
Cheap electronics are cheap because the technology has been around so long it's been optimized to the moon and back. There isn't much more optimization you can squeeze out of it to lower the cost more than they already are. So increased competition in the market for this stuff wouldn't lower the price much.
The original poster is right. Low demand coupled with highly optimized manufacturing (thanks to competition in the past) keeps the price of old hardware low. Old inventory, which companies try to get rid of below manufacturing cost to recover at least some of their initial investment, drives the price even lower. If demand were to shift towards older hardware, its price would go up, not down.
Claiming that an RTG released more P-238 than all previous nuclear explosions, when the manufacturing process for a nuclear bomb involves getting rid of as much P-238 as possible before it's ever exploded. (P-239 is fissible, P-238 is not and a lot of work goes into getting rid of it to produce a viable bomb.) The layman would read that as "the RTG released more plutonium than all previous nuclear explosions," which is probably the point - to mislead the reader into thinking the danger from an RTG is like the danger from a nuclear bomb.
If you insist on using solar power, a better solution would be harnessing wave energy and sub-oceanic thermal differentials. Those oceans out there are already soaking up 70% of the solar energy that hits the earth. Why pave the land with solare panels?
Kinda like how in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, a company has trademarked a name like "windows", even when window has meant something very specific in the rest of the English-speaking world for hundreds of years?
Of course it's a lot of money. But we're not talking about sums of money, we're talking about % of GNP; and 1% just isn't that big (it's not small either, but it's nowhere near the magnitude of disparity in gross spending).
The average spending is around 3% and the 43:rd place puts US on the upper half of the list.
That's interpreting the statistics to make it fit your conclusions. Because the data doesn't directly support your conclusion that the U.S. is a big spender, you interpret the data in a way which groups the U.S. with the big spenders. Ergo guilt by association.
Take a standard deviation of those spending figures. The U.S. is well within one standard deviation of the average. That means the data supports the conclusion that the U.S. is pretty much average in terms of its military spending as % of GNP. Yes it's on the high side of average, but it's still closer to average than to the high spenders you're trying to group it with.